Hillary Clinton: ‘I Want To Raise The Federal Minimum Wage To $12’

Hillary Clinton calls for minimum wage to be raised to $12 – but that’s far below where her chief opponent wants it.

Hillary Clinton has made championing women’s issues a strong plank in her campaign for the presidency, but late Tuesday afternoon the Democratic frontrunner announced she wants to raise the minimum wage – to $12.

“I want to raise the federal minimum wage to $12, and encourage other communities to go even higher,” she said in Iowa. 

Her top Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, has called for a $15 minimum wage.

Clinton’s Twitter page is currently filled with posts about pay equity and equal pay for women, but the vast majority of minimum wage workers are women.

“Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers and two-thirds of tipped workers,” the National Women’s Law Center, which calls for a $12 minimum wage, wrote in May. “Women of color are 23 percent of minimum wage workers, compared to 16 percent of all workers. Thirty percent of working women—and 37 percent of working women of color—would get a raise if the minimum wage increased to $12.00 per hour by 2020.”

In July, Clinton mentioned a $12 minimum wage but did not commit to it.

“Let’s not just do it for the sake of having a higher number out there,” she said. “But let’s get behind a proposal that actually has a chance of succeeding.”

“I think it’s going to be important that we set a national minimum, but then we get out of the way of cities and states that believe that they can and should go higher,” Clinton also said.

Her remarks today, taken in conjunction with those in July, seem to suggest she does not believe $15 makes sense nationwide, given different costs of living across the country.

 

Image via Hillary Clinton/Twitter