AMERICAN workers who are similarly in dire strait due to the COVID-19 pandemic and who largely voted for US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are in for another shocker after Biden and the Democratic Party, which now controls both the House and the Senate, “effectively ended” efforts to raise the federal minimum wage by $15 per hour last February 25, 2021, as part of the ‘stimulus package’ making its way through Congress.
Here is an abridged report from the ‘World Socialist Website’ of the Fourth International filed by Marcus Day:
The White House and congressional Democrats have falsely sought to present themselves as having their hands tied, holding up the advisory ruling of the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth McDonough, as an excuse.
McDonough, an unelected official appointed to her role by the Democrats in 2012, ruled that the wage hike is not allowable in a bill using the budget reconciliation process.
Vice President Kamala Harris, in her role as Senate president, has the ability to overrule the Senate parliamentarian. Or, if the Democrats had any inclination to press the issue, they could have fired McDonough and replaced her, as the Republicans did in order to move tax cuts through the Senate under then-President George W. Bush in 2001.
The Democrats have rejected these options out of hand, however.
Some Senate Democrats, including Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders, have subsequently sought to save face by saying they are exploring utilizing tax incentives to encourage major corporations to raise wages.
Tellingly, Biden has shown that when it comes to defending the interests of US imperialism, he sees not the slightest need for deference to parliamentary or legal norms.
While Democratic officials were taking to the airwaves to bemoan their powerlessness to overcome arcane Senate rules to raise the minimum wage, US missiles were raining down on Syria, in an attack ordered by Biden with no pretense of congressional authorization or respect for either US or international law.
Only weeks into the Biden administration, the Democratic Party is once again demonstrating its total subservience to the interests of the financial oligarchy and its opposition to any significant measures to address the needs of the working class.
The Democrats’ predictable cynicism, duplicity and spinelessness over the $15 minimum wage hike, a central campaign promise by Biden, at the same time exposes the bankruptcy of the perspective espoused by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and other pseudo-left promoters of the Democratic Party, based on the claim that it is a “lesser evil” that can be pushed to enact progressive reforms.
The $15 minimum wage itself would have been a poverty wage, grossly inadequate to meet the cost of living in large portions of the US.
But even this meager amelioration of desperate social need has been shown to be virtually impossible to enact under both Democratic and Republican administrations, both of which subordinate every decision to the needs of big business and the financial oligarchy.
The current federal minimum wage of $7.25—roughly $15,000 a year before taxes for a single worker—amounts to starvation rations.
The nearly 12 years since its last increase is the longest stretch without a rise in the history of the federal minimum wage, going back to the first enactment of a national minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, amidst the explosive class battles of the Great Depression.
The extended freeze of the federal minimum wage is not an accident.
These low-wage conditions, perpetuated by both the Democrats and Republicans through the suppression of the minimum wage and other means, have become critical to the operations of American capitalism, the artificial inflation of stock values, and the maintenance and growth of the fortunes of the financial oligarchy.
Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and leading DSA members supported Biden in 2020, holding him up as an alternative to the reactionary policies of Trump.
It has taken less than two months for this claim to be exploded, as has every fraudulent political guarantee by Sanders before it.
Biden and the Democrats are neither able nor willing to raise the living standards of workers, meaningfully address climate change, put a stop to the US war machine, or resolve any of the other major social problems confronting humanity.