The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty — period.

But today’s federal minimum wage can’t keep a full-time working mama and her baby out of poverty. Not to mention, recent studies have found that a minimum wage earner working a 40-hour week can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the country. 

The last time Congress increased it was 2007. Sixteen years ago. Three presidencies ago. The first-ever iPhone was just announced for sale. The series finale of The Sopranos had just aired. 

Yeah, that long ago. 

That is wrong, and that is why I’m fighting to raise it.

So I’m co-sponsoring a bill with Senator Bernie Sanders and dozens of our colleagues to increase the minimum wage to $17 an hour. 

It’s long past time to deliver a raise to tens of millions of hardworking Americans, and we need to mobilize as much support as possible to get momentum behind this bill. So add your name if you agree our government must raise the minimum wage, and let’s fight side by side to make it happen.

This is an issue that hits close to home for me.

After my daddy had a heart attack, he couldn’t work for a while. Bills piled up. We lost the family station wagon, and it looked like the house could be next.

But one day, I walked in on my mother pacing back and forth in her bedroom, with a black dress laid out on the bedspread. The dress that only came out for weddings, funerals, and graduations. “We are not going to lose this house,” she kept saying. “We are not going to lose this house.”

She’d never worked outside the home. She was terrified. But she knew what she had to do. She put on that dress, she walked down the street to Sears, and she got a minimum wage job that saved our house and saved our family.

But families in that same situation today wouldn’t be able to say the same thing. The cost of living has skyrocketed while wages have stayed stagnant. Greedy corporations are taking advantage of working families any chance they get. CEOs are being paid 399 times as much as a typical worker. (We’ve also got a bill to address this, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would tax companies on the basis of their CEO-to-worker compensation ratio.)

Raising the federal minimum wage  is part of how we put our government on the side of working people — not just the rich and powerful.

But to get this done, Washington needs to see the American people demanding action. Add your name if you support raising the minimum wage to $17 an hour.

Thanks for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

P.S. Do you have any feedback on this plan or for our campaign in general? Please share with me here. I appreciate hearing your thoughts.