Senator Bernie Sanders has called on Congress to raise the minimum wage in the United States to $17 an hour. He made the announcement during a press conference where he stated that the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee would introduce new legislation on 14 June that would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $17 over the course of five years. Sanders argued that nobody should be working for starvation wages and that increasing the minimum wage was necessary to ensure that people could live a decent life. The senator highlighted that the current federal minimum wage had not been increased since 2009, and 15 states still use the federal minimum wage as their employee wages. The proposal is the latest effort by Sanders to raise the minimum wage after similar efforts failed in 2017 and 2019. The Economic Policy Institute estimated that there is no city in America where a single adult without children can reach an adequate standard of living on less than $15 an hour. Sanders is now calling for an increase to account for inflation.
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