Raise the Minimum Wage

Floor Speech

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Mr. TORRES of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank Teresa for those kind words.

I have the honor of representing New York 15, the South Bronx, which is often said to be the poorest congressional district in America. The unemployment rate in the South Bronx can be as high as 25 percent compared to 5 percent in the Upper East Side, so we are living through a tale of two cities.

But COVID-19 has shown the South Bronx to be the essential congressional district. It is the home of essential workers who put their lives at risk during the peak of the pandemic so that the rest of us could safely shelter in place. We owe it to those workers to give them a fighting chance at a decent and dignified life.

Our society will be judged by how we treat the most essential among us. There is a gap between the value of what our essential workers do and how poorly we treat them and how poorly we pay them. Bridging that essential gap is one of the great moral imperatives of our time.

Raising the minimum wage is long overdue. The minimum wage in America has been lagging behind inflation. It has been lagging behind the productivity of the American workforce. It has been lagging behind the historic average.

We have gone more than a decade, the longest we have ever gone, without raising the minimum wage by even a cent. By every metric, whether it is inflation or productivity or the historic average or the length of time that we have gone without raising the minimum wage, it is time to finally lift the minimum wage for the most essential workers among us.

The statistics are clear that raising the minimum wage would lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty. It would raise incomes for 17,000 Americans.

For me, the minimum wage is exactly that. It is the minimum of what we should do for our most essential workers. If we fail to raise the minimum wage, then shame on us. Shame on us for failing to do right by the essential workers who did right by all of us in our moment of greatest need.

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Mr. TORRES of New York. Mr. Speaker, she is exactly right. The promise of America is that if you work hard and play by the rules, then you should have access to a decent, dignified life. Too many of our essential workers are paid starvation wages.

You have people who are doing everything right. They are working their heart out for the country and for their families, and they are struggling to survive because the cost of living in America, especially in cities like New York, is spiraling out of control.

So the promise of America is broken as long as we continue to pay our most essential workers poverty wages. It is no longer defensible.

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Mr. Speaker, we cannot simply honor our essential workers with hollow words. We, as a country, have to put our money where our mouth is and do right by them.

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