Opponents of a minimum wage increase are “running out of excuses,” President Obama said Saturday during his weekly address.
Raising the minimum wage would “grow jobs and wages faster,” Obama said, helping to stop what he called the “profound erosion of middle-class jobs.”
“We do better when the middle class does better, and when more Americans have their way to climb into the middle class,” Obama concluded.
The president warned that his effort to stabilize the middle class would be a long-term process. “The much longer and profound erosion of middle-class jobs and incomes isn’t something we’re going to reverse overnight,” he said.
Obama touted how much better the economy has been under his administration since the recession, noting specifically the growth in manufacturing jobs.
“Manufacturing is the quintessential middle-class job. And after a decade of losing jobs, American manufacturing is once again adding them — more than 700,000 over the past four and a half years,” he said.
“We’re on pace to make 2014 the strongest year of job growth since the 1990s,” Obama said from a steel manufacturing plant in Indiana.
The Labor Department reported Friday that the jobless rate fell to 5.9 percent — good news for Obama as he pushes his economic message ahead of the November midterms.
Wages remained stagnant according to Friday’s jobs report, dropping to $24.53 an hour for all employees.
