Congressman Cohen Introduces $15 Minimum Wage Bill

MEMPHIS – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09) today introduced The Living Wage Now Act today, a measure to immediately increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Congressman Cohen made the following statement:

"In such a rich nation, it is immoral that the federal minimum wage puts a full-time worker in a family of two below the poverty line. It is well past time to raise the minimum to $15 – and not incrementally, but all at once. Families are struggling and some employees are rightly treating fair wages as a collective bargaining issue. I hope that, with a new Labor Secretary and a forward-thinking Biden Administration, this legislation will be seen as a practical solution to meeting the needs of American workers and their families."

Congressman Cohen voted in 2019 for H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, which would have raised the minimum wage to $15 gradually over seven years. In 2007, in his first year in Congress, Congressman Cohen voted for an increase in the minimum wage that became law. That law raised the minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour. It was the first time the minimum wage had been raised after ten years, and it has not been raised since.