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- Democrats and labor leaders discussed strategies to raise the minimum wage on a Friday call.
- Proposals include using reconciliation, adding it to a must-pass bill, or eliminating the filibuster.
- These calls to raise the wage will likely face pushback from moderate and conservative lawmakers.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
While the lack of a minimum wage increase in the latest stimulus bill was a blow to many progressives, they aren't giving up the fight to ensure the wage gets increased this year.
And on Friday, they joined labor leaders in a call with reporters to share ways they might look to pass the provision through Congress.
Rep. Ro Khanna of California, along with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry, Co-Chair of the Poor People's Campaign Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, and other Democrats joined in the call to discuss strategies to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
"There needs to be a clear plan, a clear strategy," Khanna told The Washington Post in an interview. "It's not enough to just say, well, we're committed to this, we want to get it done."
In a Twitter thread on Friday, Khanna outlined the possible paths Democrats could take in getting a minimum wage increase passed before the end of the year. Those include getting the provision ruled admissible in the next reconciliation bill, attaching the raise to must-pass legislation, like the National Defense Authorization bill, or getting rid of the filibuster to pass legislation with a simple majority in the Senate.
-Rep. Ro Khanna (@RepRoKhanna) March 19, 2021
Khanna's proposed strategies are likely to run into obstacles in Congress. The Senate parliamentarian has already ruled once that a $15 minimum wage increase does not belong in a reconciliation bill, and although progressive lawmakers wrote a letter to Biden urging him to overrule the decision, he never did.
And while Biden said in an ABC News interview on Tuesday that he would support reforming the filibuster, doing so has received strong opposition from conservatives like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that if the filibuster is eliminated, Republicans "wouldn't stop at erasing every liberal change that hurt the country" once they regain control.
"The pendulum would swing both ways, and it would swing hard," McConnell said.
Raising the wage to $15 an hour has also gotten some pushback from moderate Democrats, like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who advocated for an increase to $11 an hour, instead.
The president has not yet commented on how, or when, he will go about raising the minimum wage, but Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota told Insider last week that she, along with a group of progressives, will meet with the White House soon to strategize the increase.
Rep. Donald Norcross of New Jersey, who attended the strategy call, said on Twitter: "To anyone who is opposed to raising the minimum wage: Try living off $7.25/hour. You just can't."