Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday applauded low-wage federal contract workers, saying their months of protest had paved the way for President Barack Obama’s upcoming executive order to raise the minimum wage for new contractors.
Echoing Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night, Reps. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus, congratulated those who had pressed the administration for months to raise the minimum wage for new federal contracts from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. [...]
Although details of the coming executive order remain to be seen, Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at the liberal policy group Demos, predicted it will impact hundreds of thousands of workers over the next few years. Obama’s move, she said, “offers huge potential for fostering good jobs.”
“Raising wages on the low end puts that money into the pockets of working people that will spend it on their needs,” she said.
Read the Demos report: Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality
