The State House passed HB 257 today by a vote of 146-50!! Congratulations to everyone who have worked so hard on this issue. A delegation from the Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition was in Harrisburg yesterday lobbying swing Republicans on the bill.
The amendment to raise the increase to $7.15 passed 130-66. The bill will increase the minimum wage to $6.25 on July 1, 2006 and to $7.15 on July 1, 2007. Unfortunately, a $5.15 training wage, for 60 days for workers under age 20 was also included.
The Senate is next.
Again, getting a vote is the key step. We are pretty sure that if we get a vote, we will win.
It looks like Rep. Mark Cohen and I will continue to disagree about whether civil disobedience will be necessary to get a vote in the Senate.
Where I disagree with Mark Cohen is that I don’t think our goal is to convince moderate Republicans to support an increase in the minimum wage. Nothing we do is going to convince them that it is the right policy. Most Republicans are ideologically opposed to the bill and, in addition, they do not want to face the wrath of small business people who oppose an increase in the minimum wage. Yet most Republicans also know that an increase in the minimum wage is extremely popular. So, if it comes to a vote, most of them in the Senate will vote for it. That is why most Republicans in the Senate do not want the leadership to bring it up for a vote.
We secured a vote in the house in part because the Speaker and three other Representatives are from Philadelphia. They felt the heat from community groups and, even more, from labor. (This is another big victory we owe in part to Pat Eiding, the president of the AFL-CIO.) We put a lot of pressure on Speaker Perzel, to the point of letting him know that if we did not get a vote in the House, our direct action would be directed against him.
So what do we do in the Senate? I hope that the vote in the House, and the publicity it gets, will help increase the visibility of the issue and keep the public pressure on the Senators and, especially, the leadership. The Minimum Wage Coalition organizing effort in Senate Majority Leader Brightbill’s district may help as well. So maybe direct action will not be needed. But, if the Senate leadership does not schedule a vote soon, I am ready to move forward to increase the public pressure on them with any means necessary.
Mark Cohen gives me no reason to think that civil disobedience will have any effect on how moderate Republicans vote. Again, we are not trying to convert them. The only reason they will allow a vote and vote for the minimum wage is public pressure. So the question is how do we bring the most pressure on them? I don’t see Rep. Cohen’s strategy for increasing that pressure. Some Republicans may try to spin civil disobedience from the question of whether we should have a vote on the minimum wage to the question of crime. I think we can defeat this rhetorical move.
And I would point out again that most of the public pressure that got us a vote in the House has come from the efforts of our rag-tag Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition, not from any of the leaders of the Democratic Party in Harrisburg.
Indeed, the party leadership on this issue exemplifies all the problems I have been pointing to in my continuing series on the future of progressive politics in Pennsylvania. There has been a failure on the part of the leadership to take an active role in mobilizing public support, that is, to develop an outside strategy to complement the inside strategy of deal making in Harrisburg. There has been a failure to develop an alternative set of ideological ideas to replace Republican ideas. (Note how Rep. Cohen is always talking about the skillful Republican rhetoricians. One reason they are so good is that our side is so bad.) And there has been a failure of militancy.
Our party’s leadership has been on this issue, as on so many others, timid. It is time to take the fight to the Republicans and challenge the ideological ascendency of the right. What we have been getting from our party, in Harrisburg and in Washington, DC, reminds me of one of my favorite jokes about the mentality of Jews raised in the ghetto:
Two Jews are about to be executed before a firing squad. The are offered cigarettes before the execution. The first one takes a drag and says , “This is just about the worst cigarette I have ever smoked.” The second replies, “Be quiet. If they hear you, we will get in trouble.”
For twenty five years, liberal ideas have been under fire of Republican executioners. And now, our Democratic leaders tell us that we liberals should not make waves so as to avoid getting into trouble with those very same executioners.
I don’t get it.