House Democrats on Monday are excited about their plans to undo slavery and past racism by raising the minimum wage of tip workers and giving overtime pay to farm and live-in domestic workers.
Uh, okay, but dead slaves don’t care. We can’t undo a horrible injustice for those who are deceased.
Democrats want to undo slavery and long-ago discriminatory policies. Republicans said it would overstep federal authority, harm the economy and cost the workers their jobs.
Businesses are struggling to survive, and the borders are wide open. This looks like bad timing.
-
The Importance of Prayer: How a Christian Gold Company Stands Out by Defending Americans’ Retirement
THE STORY
At a hearing of a House Education and Labor subcommittee, Democrats said Congress excluded professions such as waitresses and farmworkers from the nation’s main labor protection law, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1936. They said it was because most workers doing those jobs were people of color.
Southern Democrats [the racist, segregationist Democrats] a key voting bloc at the time, objected to raising the pay of Black workers to be closer to those in jobs more likely done by White workers, said Rep. Alma Adams, North Carolina Democrat. She is the chairwoman of the House Education and Labor Committee’s workforce protections subcommittee.
“After 80 years, the FLSA still includes aspects of our nation’s history and racial discrimination by expressly denying farmworkers, domestic workers, and tip workers the full protections of wage and hour protections,” she said.
Ending the disparity of the tipped minimum wage has been a goal on the far left for years, though without tying the issue to racism.
Tipped workers such as restaurant servers are now entitled to a $2.13 minimum wage. Tips make up the difference with the $7.25 minimum wage for other workers.
A bill by committee Chairman Bobby Scott, Virginia Democrat, would double the regular minimum wage to $15 by 2025. The minimum wage for tipped employees would gradually rise to the same level by 2027.
It actually hurts tipped workers and many waiters don’t want it. People won’t be as generous in their tips, knowing they get paid better and the food costs more.
OVERTIME PAY?
Democrats also are pushing bills previously introduced by then-senator and now Vice President Kamala Harris that would require farmworkers and live-in domestic workers to get overtime pay, The Washington Times reports.
Ms. Dixon told lawmakers they have an obligation to act. “To ensure that our economy and the larger society is truly fair and just, we must center racial equity in policy choices and directly confront how racism shaped the economy we have now,” she said. “This stratification perpetuates two-tiered workplaces [not true] and a Jim Crow [Democrats were Jim Crow] economy.”
However, Paul DeCamp, an administrator in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division during the George W. Bush administration and now a labor lawyer in Washington questioned the constitutionality of the federal government telling people that they have to pay overtime to domestic workers living with them in their private homes. [They’re getting free board]
Mr. DeCamp said businesses and farms would respond to having to pay higher wages and overtime by laying off workers.
The Democratic proposals, he said, “will hurt more people than it will lift out of poverty.”
“A radical mandated wage policy and one-size-fits-all regulations will lead to fewer economic opportunities, less economic freedom, restricted hours for workers, and less use of automation, all the while harming our economic recovery from COVID-19,” he said.
wpDiscuz
