Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is putting his weight behind raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour — but with a twist.
Unlike proposals from Democrats that would raise the minimum wage across the board over the next five years, Hawley’s proposed legislation would target only those companies with revenues in excess of $1 billion.
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“For decades, the wages of everyday, working Americans have remained stagnate while monopoly corporations have consolidated industry after industry, securing record profits for CEOs and investment bankers,” the Missouri senator said in a statement. “Mega-corporations can afford to pay their workers $15 an hour, and it’s long past time they do so, but this should not come at the expense of small businesses already struggling to make it.”
The biggest corporations in America can afford to pay their workers $15 an hour. Raise the minimum wage for big business, not small business
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) February 23, 2021
The bill would also index the minimum wage to inflation after reaching $15 an hour in 2025.
The proposed legislation would operate in tandem with another bill Hawley intends to introduce — the Blue Collar Bonus. That bill would provide a tax credit to those who make less than the median hourly wage of $16.15 an hour, also indexed to inflation in the future. The credit would be “worth 50 percent of the difference between the median wage and the worker’s hourly wage rate.”
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Democrats in the Senate and the House wanted to include a measure in the next coronavirus relief package that would raise the minimum wage to $15 across the board over the next five years but were dealt a serious setback when the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that the measure would not pass the so-called Byrd Rule, a Senate rule that limits what legislation is allowed to be passed in a budget reconciliation package.
Those who support including the $15 minimum wage measure have argued that Vice President Kamala Harris, who presides over the Senate, has the power to overrule the parliamentarian, but the White House has said that it would not ask Harris to circumvent the rules and procedures of the upper chamber.
