The executive order comes as part of a larger campaign for a minimum wage of $ 15 an hour in the United States.
United States President Joe Biden will issue an executive order to raise the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of federal contractors to $ 15, the White House has said.
Tuesday’s decision will raise the current minimum wage of $ 10.95 by nearly 37% by March of next year and will continue to tie future increases to inflation, according to the White House. This is part of a bigger push by some Democrats and Biden to make the national minimum wage of $ 15.
“The decree guarantees that hundreds of thousands of workers will no longer have to work full time and still live in poverty,” the White House said in a statement. “It will improve the economic security of families and move towards reversing decades of income inequality.”
The ordinance will apply to federal workers, from cleaning and maintenance personnel, to food service contractors and laborers, to overworked workers who were previously excluded from the last increase under former President Barack Obama.
White House officials insist it will not increase costs to taxpayers because of the benefits, including increased worker productivity and reduced turnover.
Biden won the 2020 presidential election with backing from the so-called Northern Rust Belt states, some of the last strongholds in the United States of strong unions. He said strong unions and higher wages can resurrect America’s middle class while helping to reduce economic and racial inequalities.
Support at work
The most recent move comes after Biden on Monday signed another order to create a White House task force that will promote unions and labor organizing, which will be led by Vice President Kamala Harris.
The move was a significant attempt to use federal government resources to help stem a decline union membership in the country.
Since taking office, Biden has removed government officials whom unions have labeled as hostile at work and has reversed Trump-era rules that weakened worker protection. He also appeared in a video referring to workers at an Amazon facility in Alabama to vote to form a union – an effort that made does not end in success.
Biden tried to insert a federal minimum wage of $ 15 into the $ 1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill signed in March, but it was rejected on a procedural matter by the Senate parliamentarian.