Subject: Re: Wage Effort Poses Test for Clinton Campaign - NYTimes.com
From: Ann HRC <[email-masked]>
To: Nick Merrill <[email-masked]>
Cc: hrcrapid <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 21:32:56 -0700
List-Id: <hrcrapid.googlegroups.com>

When I spoke at the Democracy Alliance today, a number of our friends came up to say that they hope to see HRC put out something supportive on "4-15" in the Fight for $15.  Of course, they most want us to come out for $15, but absent that they expect that she tweets support for their efforts. SEIU is also using this opportunity to roll-out their child care campaign push for $15 for child care workers.

Can we do something creative to support efforts without coming out for a number?

Ann O’Leary
Sent from my iPhone
(510) 717-5518 (cell)

> On Apr 13, 2015, at 9:17 PM, Nick Merrill <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/business/wage-effort-poses-test-for-clinton-campaign.html?ref=business
> 
> Wage Effort Poses Test for Clinton Campaign
> 
> Photo
>                                
> A rally to raise the minimum wage at the capitol in Albany last June was among efforts across the nation to increase pay. Credit Mike Groll/Associated Press
> The grass-roots energy building around the minimum wage issue may upend Hillary Rodham Clinton’s plans to ease into proposing specific economic policies.
> 
> The issue will be in the foreground on Wednesday, when fast-food and other low-wage workers plan a nationwide walkout that is expected to draw tens of thousands of people to rally support for a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The protest is the latest show of strength by the Fight for $15, a campaign that economists partly credit with the recent decisions by employers like Walmart and McDonald’s to raise the minimum wage they pay workers.
> 
> The daylong strike may provide the first test for the campaign at managing the desire of voters and party activists for an aggressive approach to mitigating income inequality. Mrs. Clinton said that she was running for president because “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” but she has offered few details about how to bridge that gap.
> 
> “The campaign is clearly going to have to come out with a position on it,” said Dean Baker, a progressive economist who met with economic advisers to Mrs. Clinton on other issues. “There is pressure on her to come up with a number.”
> 
> Photo
> 
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> Pedro Taverna, 18, protesting for better wages at a Walmart store in Los Angeles. Credit Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
> Unlike free trade or financial sector profits, the minimum wage issue is not one that in principle creates a political problem for Mrs. Clinton, who has long supported the policy. The challenge is the sheer speed at which the center of the debate has shifted, and the hunger among voters for action.
> 
> Already, moderate Democratic politicians around the country have begun to advocate substantial increases in the minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour on the federal level although can be higher in states and localities.
> 
> Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a former Clinton White House aide, recently backed a measure raising the minimum wage in the city to $13 from $8.25 by 2019. Senator Patty Murray of Washington is lining up support among a wide array of Democratic senators for a proposal that would raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020.
> 
> “The days of debating $9 or $10 an hour are over. The active debate is in the realm of $12 to $15,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a grass-roots organizing group with nearly one million members. “In 2016, the Murray $12-an-hour position will be the floor, not the ceiling.”
> 
> It is not just grass-roots activists and Mrs. Clinton’s fellow Democratic politicians who have come out in favor of a substantial wage increase. Those who attended the semiannual meeting this week of the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy progressive donors created with help from the billionaire investor George Soros and the insurance mogul Peter Lewis, reported that the minimum-wage campaign had become a topic of discussion as the donors grappled with income inequality.
> 
> “Fast-food workers in the street for $15, that changes the conversation,” said Stephen M. Silberstein, a member of the Democracy Alliance, who also was executive producer of the recent documentary, Inequality for All. “You didn’t have that a couple years ago.”
> 
> With a recent accumulation of economic literature suggesting that moderate increases in the minimum wage have little to no cost when it comes to employment, opposition even among economists in the business world has begun to melt. Last Thursday, the economic research department of Goldman Sachs, which is widely followed by policy makers, released an analysis of minimum wage increases that made no allusion to possible job losses.
> 
> “It was remarkable to me,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. who is now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There was no mention in the whole analysis of disemployment effects.”
> 
> Even Republicans, whose party has long been skeptical of the minimum wage, have begun to soften their opposition. “I’m not for repealing the minimum wage,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said at a candidate forum in January. “But I can tell you, I don’t want people to make $10.10 an hour. I want them to make $30 an hour.”
> 
> After the Republican-controlled legislature in Michigan balked at raising the minimum wage early last year, activists collected 300,000 signatures on behalf of a proposed ballot initiative to raise the state’s wage floor to $10.10 from $7.40, and index it to inflation thereafter. One day before activists planned to submit the petition, the Republican legislature passed an increase to $9.25, including the permanent cost-of-living adjustment.
> 
> “There was terror that it would get on the November ballot,” said Saru Jayaraman, whose group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United fights for wage increases for tipped workers. “There’s a lot of talk in Michigan of coming back and doing it again.”
> 
> With the issue so volatile, Republicans are not the only one being overtaken by grass-roots developments. President Obama initially came out for a $9-an-hour minimum wage in his 2013 State of the Union address, then embraced $10.10 later that year. Though it was a significant increase for a White House to advocate, many Democrats by that point had already set their sights substantially higher with the Fight for $15 campaign gaining prominence.
> 
> “Progressives were pleased we rightly moved to $10.10,” said Gene Sperling, who was Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser between 2011 and early 2014 and has also advised Mrs. Clinton. “But with Republicans blocking it in Congress, advocates understandably decided that it couldn’t compete with the type of impressive grass-roots passion they have been able to generate fighting for $15 city by city.”
> 
> The White House has yet to take a position on Senator Murray’s proposal for a $12 minimum wage.
> 
> Mrs. Clinton has voiced her support for the “fast-food and domestic workers all across our country who ask for nothing more than a living wage and a fair shot.”
> 
> An aide said that, “she’s for an increase in the minimum wage, and she wants to have a conversation about the right target and timeline.”
> 
> Even progressive economists argue that some caution is merited. Mr. Bernstein, a supporter of a substantial minimum wage increase with a reputation as being the Obama White House’s most liberal in-house economist, said that $15 an hour gave him pause because it was “out of sample.” That is, there was no precedent to demonstrate it wouldn’t cost jobs.
> 
> The question of speed, though, may be especially sensitive for Mrs. Clinton.
> 
> She may ultimately align with her party’s base on many economic issues. But any reluctance by Mrs. Clinton to say whether she explicitly supports the goals of the Fight for $15 campaign — or even how far toward them she would hope to come as president — could curb enthusiasm for her candidacy among progressives and low-income workers at the very moment she’s officially engaged.
> 
> Mrs. Clinton, after all, promised in her announcement that she wanted to be a champion for “everyday Americans.” She pledged to labor on their behalf “so that you can do more than just get by. You can get ahead, and stay ahead.”
> 
> “She has a massive challenge in the general election,” said Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law School professor who mounted an unexpectedly strong Democratic primary challenge to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last year. “The strategy of silence and then gradual coming around does not lead people, even if the sentence polls well, to get out and organize.”
> 
> Next in Business Day
> 
> Owner of a Credit Card Processor Is Setting a New Minimum Wage: $70,000 a Year
> 
> 
> 
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