WASHINGTON, July 22 – Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) co-sponsored a Senate bill with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to more than double the $7.25 an hour required under current law and close a loophole that has let employers pay tipped workers just $2.13 an hour.

“It is a national disgrace that millions of full-time workers are living in poverty and millions more are forced to work two or three jobs just to pay their bills,” Sanders said at the outdoor rally near the Capitol. “In the year 2015, a job must lift workers out of poverty, not keep them in it.  The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and must be raised to a living wage.”

Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) and other members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sponsored a companion version of the bill in the House to phase in increases in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.  

The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009.  Increasing the minimum wage would directly benefit 62 million workers who currently make less than $15 an hour, including over half of African-American workers and close to 60 percent of Latino workers.  If the minimum wage had kept up with productivity and inflation since 1968, it would be more than $26 an hour today.

Despite resistance by the Republican-run House and Senate, most Americans favor raising the minimum wage. A Hart Research Associates survey in January found that 63 percent of the American people support increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

State and cities are acting on their own. New York’s Wage Board today is expected to approve a new $15 minimum hourly pay for the state’s 200,000 fast food workers. Washington, D.C., and Kansas City, Missouri, are considering raising the wage. Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco already passed ordinances raising their minimum wage to $15 an hour. Twenty-six states already enacted minimum wage increases.

More than 200 economists and labor experts released a letter endorsing the legislation.  The letter was signed by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich; Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts; James Galbraith of the University of Texas; Howard Stein of the University of Michigan and others.