WASHINGTON – This morning, Senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour over the next four years while tightening enforcement on hiring undocumented workers.
In response, Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, former managing director of BlackRock, Inc., and author of the upcoming book Tax the Rich, issued the following statement:
“The Romney/Cotton minimum wage bill is pathetic. There is nowhere in the United States where $10 an hour is enough to live on today. That will be even more true in four years. While tens of millions of Americans live and work in poverty, this bill would increase wages for only 3.5 million workers. By comparison, the Raise the Wage Act would increase wages for nearly ten times as many Americans, 32 million.
The President has made it clear: the American people need help now. $10 four years from now is nowhere near enough.
The E-verify requirements in the bill may be even more ridiculous than the $10 maximum. Telling the American people to ignore the billionaires who have gotten even richer during the pandemic and instead focus their attention on the Main Street small businesses not yet using the E-verify system is absurd.
It’s not the fault of undocumented immigrants that billionaire business owners aren’t giving their employees a fair share of the value they create. Trying to pit one group of workers against another to promote the xenophobic policies that Americans overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box will not help any of us. This is an anti-immigrant, low-wage bill masquerading as an attempt to help American workers.”
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
