Tenn. Congressman Steve Cohen introduces $15 minimum wage bill

Congressman Cohen introduces bill to raise minimum wage to $15/hour
By WMC Action News 5 Staff | January 15, 2021 at 10:10 AM CST - Updated January 15 at 7:07 PM

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee has introduced a bill that could increase the federal minimum wage to $15.

According to a news release, ‘The Living Wage Now Act’ was introduced Friday by Cohen.

“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 Steve Cohen (TN-09)

The news release added that 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.

During Cohen’s first year in Congress in 2007, he 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.

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