Wal-Mart has always paid low wages, or, as Sam Walton put it, 'as little as we could get by with at the time.'
These Americans are among the working poor with full-time jobs earning $5.15 an hour. Millions fall into this boat, even more when you consider that the poverty line has not been adequately adjusted to reflect the true level of poverty in this country.
Raising the minimum wage means raising the living wage - and that's good news for Ohio.
One of the biggest disagreements between Sen. Hagan and I - I don't believe we should be building an economy that's founded on making ends meet on minimum wage. It's impossible; it's a stepping stone.
On balance, I am a supporter of the minimum wage going up. We've got to be very careful what we wish for because some employers - and there could be a lot of them - will be scared away from hiring new people or creating incremental hours for part-time people as a result of that wage going up.
When we talk about the kind of folks whose lives will be made better by raising the minimum wage, we're not talking about a couple teenagers earning extra spending money to supplement their allowance. We're talking about providers and breadwinners. Working Americans with bills to pay and mouths to feed.
If Donald Trump wants to raise the minimum wage to $15, yes, I will work with Donald Trump.
Full-time workers earning the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 only earn about $14,500 a year in wages - below the poverty line for a family of two. That's unacceptable.
I've been very outspoken that the minimum wage needs to rise.
Walmart is so huge that a wage boost at Walmart would ripple through the entire economy, putting more money in the pockets of low-wage workers. This would help boost the entire economy - including Walmart's own sales.
Industrial homework is a dead end, perpetuating the misery and poverty of those it traps. It creates a subclass of workers who receive none of the benefits for which America's working people have fought, sometimes at the cost of their lives.
During the 1960s, rising real wages for low-income and high-income workers, due in part to rapid economic growth and the spread of unionization, worked in tandem with expanding government support systems to improve Americans' well-being.
Most of America doesn't pay dishwashers $10.
The value of the minimum wage shouldn't be eroded, and it has been.
There are some people who have had no pay rises for a very long time, and, working in highly skilled and highly responsible roles and in the health services and education, they deserve to be properly remunerated.
Historically, industrial revolutions haven't been kind to poor people. Despite the potential benefits technology can offer, the immediate impact on the lowest-paid members of society has often been negative.
The people at the bottom who are working but working at relatively low wages need some help.
President Obama has made a minimum wage increase a focal point of his economic agenda.
Raising the minimum wage, as President Obama proposed in his State of the Union address, tends to be more popular with the general public than with economists.
Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.
Congress has not raised the minimum wage since 1997. The minimum wage is now at its lowest level in 50 years adjusted for inflation.
It has now been over 7 years since Congress last raised the minimum wage to its current level of $5.15 per hour. Since that last increase, Congress's failure to adjust the wage for inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage to record low levels.
There would be plenty of justification to raise revenues in order to subsidize businesses that employ low-wage workers. But there can be no justification for pandering to the economy's entire bottom half merely to attract its votes.
The bottom line is that five million low-income Americans working full time for minimum wage, deserve a raise.
Even if we raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, it's still hard to prosper on that wage.
