At her town hall event in Queens, New York, on Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called to raise the minimum wage.
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00:00Hey, I'm wondering, what are some of the steps that we can take to raise the minimum wage to a livable wage?
00:06Yes, thank you.
00:11So, amazing question.
00:14I think it should be, I think raising the minimum wage to a living wage should be one of the top Democratic priorities, period.
00:23And I think it should be on the top list of any priority that anybody, whether you are seeking to be any sort of leader in the Democratic Party, I think we need to be raising the minimum wage to a living wage.
00:42And in fact, in 2018, when we last had a House majority, it was under the Trump presidency.
00:49But when we had that House majority, the House passed back then a $15 minimum, national minimum wage, but it did not pass in the Mitch McConnell-controlled Senate.
01:01I think we need to reintroduce that legislation.
01:03However, that was a long time ago, and I think we need to really do an assessment of what that number should be now.
01:09But bare minimum, I think we need to be reintroducing that legislation, if not indexing it up slightly.
01:17And we were able to pass it.
01:21I think we need to work to make sure that we are, even though we are in the minority in the House, we need to make sure that we are teeing up this legislation to be able to pass in the first hundred days of a Democratic majority.
01:35Which means, I believe, introducing it to Congress, even though Republicans may not bring it to the floor, we need to have every single Democratic member of Congress co-sponsored on a minimum wage bill so that we know who is outstanding and who we need to get in order to pass this thing once we win the majority next year.
01:56Which, if I have anything to do with it, we will.
02:03So, we will continue to be organizing with our union and our labor partners, as well as many others, to ensure that that remains at the top of the docket.
02:11But the good news is that on the House side, we have that.
02:15Now, we brought it up again.
02:16Senator Sanders brought this in to try to append it to reconciliation.
02:20And famously, Kyrsten Sinema did her, like, that thing.
02:22And it did not pass the Senate because of that.
02:28But we have a new senator in that seat.
02:31And we have new numbers there.
02:34And so, I think that we hopefully will be able to do that.
02:38There was also, what was complicated in that was that there was this whole thing.
02:42It was a rule.
02:43There was something called a birdbath.
02:44And there was a reconciliation.
02:45And people were disagreeing about the rules on that.
02:47It's a long story.
02:48But the point is, is that I think where we need to target our organizing there is in the Senate, as well, and making sure that we're getting our numbers in the Senate to tee that up for passage, too.
02:59So, thank you.