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Obama To Raise Minimum Wage For Federal Contract Workers By Executive Order

Sam Stein
Dave Jamieson
Huffington Post

President Barack Obama will announce during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address that he's raising the minimum wage for workers under federal contracts to $10.10 per hour, an administration official told The Huffington Post.

The new policy, to be instituted via executive order, may affect hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs are supported by federal dollars. The move is designed in part to ratchet up pressure on Congress to pass legislation raising the minimum wage for all workers. The current federal minimum wage stands at $7.25 per hour, and hasn't been raised since 2009, after the last of a series of increases signed into law by then-President George W. Bush.

The new executive order is part of a broader pledge from the White House to pursue policies that don’t rely on congressional approval. What other policies are in the works, the administration has refused to say. [...]

The left-leaning think tank Demos produced a report last year showing that many of the food and janitorial jobs under federal contracts don't provide a living wage or basic benefits like health care or sick leave. Much of the taxpayer money instead ends up subsidizing the high salaries of executives at companies with concessions contracts, according to the report, titled "Underwriting Bad Jobs."