Phillip Tutor: Living on $7.25 an hour in Alabama's 3rd District

Feb. 25—Alabama has no state-mandated minimum wage, so low-income workers' only bulwark against peonage-style paychecks is federal law. And Alabama's guilt isn't singular. Four other Southern states have no minimum wage, either.

This unholy tilt is embedded within what James Cobb, the superb Deep South chronicler at the University of Georgia, calls the Southern strategy of labor relations. "What it is symbolic of is a dedication to the interests of the employer over those of the worker," Cobb told NPR.

So let's talk about those workers.

Specifically, let's talk about the Alabama workers in the 3rd Congressional District of U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Saks.

One of the cornerstones of the Biden administration's first year is a promise to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour — a massive alteration of the labor landscape in America. Congress last increased the floor of Americans' paychecks in 2007 when it approved a 2009 hike to $7.25 an hour, and that's where it still is today.

Fourteen years later, the lowest of low-wage workers are getting shafted, especially in states like Alabama where employees have scant power or leverage. Workers earning the federal minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, are receiving 29 percent less than minimum-wage employees 50 years ago, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There's been no cost-of-living increase, no legislated annual increase, nothing.

This isn't American excellence. It's American negligence.

The 2019 Raise The Wage Act passed the House but dissolved in the Senate. Now, it's back with a new name — theRaise The Wage Act of 2021 — a new congressional flavor and a new Oval Office tenant. It may pass.

If it becomes law, employers wouldn't be forced to more than double their minimum-wage workers' hourly pay overnight. Instead, the bill calls for gradual increases that would reach $15 an hour by 2025.

Here in our congressional district, Alabama's 3rd, the bill's passage would reverberate up and down the state's eastern boundary.

Thirty-six percent of 3rd District workers — an estimated 104,000, according to Economic Policy Institute data — would be affected by an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Of those, 34,000 are school- or college-aged Alabamians aged 16 to 24; 81 percent of that demographic's workers would get a raise. Twenty-nine percent (56,000) of the workforce's core group — 29- to 54-year-olds — would be affected. A quarter of workers aged 55 and older would benefit.

Sixty-three thousand women, or 44 percent of working women in the district, would get a raise. More than half (51 percent) of Black workers would be affected. Nearly a third (29 percent) of white workers would, too.

For the 3rd District, the Raise The Wage Act of 2021 is legislation that would overwhelmingly benefit women of all ages, young people of all races, and minorities in general. It offers generational change long shunted by politicians who feign support for American workers.

Two years ago, Rogers blasted attempts to raise the federal minimum wage, saying in a press release that he was "completely opposed to this legislation and wish House Democrats would pay attention to how detrimental this would be for East Alabama and America." (His office didn't respond to an email request for comment regarding the current act.) But words matter. Absent from Rogers' 2019 statement was any mention that the floor for low-wage Alabamians' hourly pay hadn't risen in more than a decade.

Politics, like words, also matter. So remember that two of the last three federal minimum wage increases were signed into law by Republican presidents, George H.W. Bush in 1989 and George W. Bush in 2007. The elder Bush even allowed a bit of bipartisanship to seep into partisan discussions, saying at the time that raising the federal minimum wage to $4.25 an hour by 1991 would "protect jobs and put more money into the pockets of our workers."

Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., may share slivers of that sentiment, but their compromise proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour by 2025 is milquetoast. The North Carolina Justice Center makes a cogent point: A $10 minimum wage four years from now is "equivalent of $9.19 per hour in today's dollars, or about 13 percent less than what the minimum wage was at its high-water mark in 1968."

In other words, the Republican compromise isn't a compromise. It overwhelmingly protects employers and insults the more than 25 million low-wage American workers whom the Romney-Cotton proposal would shun.

During the bloody congressional debates in 1937 over the first federal minimum wage, a committee report declared it was time to protect America from the "evils and dangers resulting from wages too low to buy the bare necessities of life." If that doesn't describe survival on $7.25 an hour in today's America, nothing does.

Email: ptutor@annistonstar.com

Phillip Tutor — ptutor@annistonstar.com — is a Star columnist. Follow him at Twitter.com/PTutor_Star.