Workers at fast food restaurants like McDonalds are struggling to make rent and falling into deeper poverty every year. But according to the highest-ranking Republican woman in the nation, they’re not looking for “top down” solutions like a higher minimum wage.
At a House leadership press conference on Tuesday, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said, “One of the highlights for me in August was actually going back to McDonald’s where I used to work when I was earning money to get through college, and put on a uniform and served some hamburgers in the drive-through. And I got to talk to some of the employees there, college students as well as young moms and dads and others that were at McDonald’s that day, and y’know what? What they want from Washington DC is solutions.”
McMorris Rodgers went on to decry the current “outdated, top-down approach” of “outdated regulations, taxes, [and] mandates that always fail to deliver” and promise that Republicans will issue “solutions that actually grow local economies from the bottom up.” Those GOP solutions will include energy bills and a jobs package, she said.
But there will be no minimum wage hike to accompany the Republican bills the fourth-ranking House Republican mentioned, despite nearly two years of strikes and protests from workers like the ones who McMorris Rodgers visited at a Colville, WA McDonald’s in early August.
Since winter 2012, fast food workers in every corner of the lower 48 states have risked retaliatory firings and even arrest to demand higher wages and the right to unionize. In that time, Republicans have blocked a hike to the federal minimum wage twice, counting votes from both houses of Congress. McMorris Rodgers has personally voted against a minimum wage increase at least twice, most recently in 2013 when Rep. George Miller (D-CA) introduced a bill to raise the pay floor to $10.10 an hour — the level required to make up for what low-wage workers have lost to inflation since the 1960s.
Republican opposition to the 2013 measure was unanimous. But McMorris Rodgers’ other minimum wage “no” came in 2007, when scores of Republicans joined Democrats to pass the first increase to the federal pay floor in a decade.
That vote is especially noteworthy because McMorris Rodgers was effectively seeking to deny today’s McDonald’s employees the same level of compensation she herself received while working at that Colville food store as a college student in the 1980s. When she voted against raising the minimum wage in 2007, it was just $5.15 an hour. While that is more than a dollar above the minimum wage level in effect during her college stint in low-wage trades, it was actually worth significantly less thanks to inflation, as this chart from Bloomberg illustrates:
CREDIT: Bloomberg News
McMorris Rodgers’ own state of Washington is an example of how higher pay for people like the McDonald’s workers she referred to on Tuesday benefits everyone. Washington has both the highest minimum wage in the country and the highest level of small business job growth over the past year. That’s not a fluke: the 13 states that raised their minimum wage levels this year have seen faster job growth than the rest of the country.
McMorris Rodgers’ version of what fast food workers need and want to obtain a higher standard of living for themselves and their families is standard among Republicans, some of whom go so far as to say that there should be no federally-mandated minimum wage.
But her comments acknowledge something else that her fellow conservatives generally paper over: the low-wage worker ranks include lots of parents and young adults trying to live independently. Fast food workers aren’t teenagers working for pocket change, as the conventional wisdom about fry cook and cashier jobs has it. Almost all the workers who would benefit from proposed minimum wage hikes are adults. A fifth of America’s children are being raised by parents who work low-wage jobs. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and other minimum wage opponents have mischaracterized these workers as young people with few responsibilities, but McMorris Rodgers’ visit to her old work site brought her face to face with the reality of these workers’ lives.
Alan Pyke
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