Thomas Perez ’83, a Brown alumnus who holds a master of public policy and a law degree from Harvard University, is the US Secretary of Labor and the former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights of the US Department of Justice.
Brown Political Review: Of all the OECD member states, only Mexico and the Czech Republic have lower legal minimum wages than the United States. What is the Department of Labor doing to change this? With the GOP regaining the Senate, what is the likelihood of federal progress?
Thomas Perez: It has been an all-hands-on-deck enterprise with raising the minimum wage…When you look at the United States in a global context, we’re not leading on this issue. The unfortunate aspect of that is when people don’t have money in their pockets, they don’t spend. The reason why Henry Ford raised the minimum wage for people on his assembly line 100 years ago was that he understood that when you put money in people’s pockets, they spend it. He also understood that when you pay people fairly, they stay longer. That’s why the majority of businesses support an increase in the minimum wage. I’m optimistic about its chances because I look at election night, and there were five ballot initiatives on the minimum wage. All of them passed, and four of them were in deep-red states: South Dakota, Nebraska, Alaska and Arkansas…People understand that you should be compensated fairly and that when the purchasing power of the minimum wage goes down 20 percent over the last 30 years, people can’t make ends meet. As we move forward, I’m hopeful. Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton came together [to raise the] minimum wage during Congressional sessions with Democratic control of the White House and Republican control of the House and the Senate. And I’m hopeful that we’ll do the same here. The October issue of the Harper’s Magazine Index included a statistic that 69 percent of Republicans say they could not live on minimum wage, but only 37 percent support raising it.
BPR: How do you explain this discrepancy?
TP: When you look at aggregate data, the majority of businesses support an increase in minimum wage. The majority of Republicans support an increase in the minimum wage…One of the most frequent things I hear from companies is, “The most important thing I need, Tom, are customers, because this has been a consumption-deprived recovery.”…My colleague, Penny Pritzker, the Secretary of Commerce — with whom I spend a lot of time — spends virtually all of her time with businesses, and she said to me the other day, “I have yet to meet a business owner who didn’t support an increase in the minimum wage.” It’s become a philosophical issue where ideology has trumped common sense. That’s unfortunate. The challenge ahead is to educate folks. I think Republicans continue to oppose the raising of the minimum wage at their political peril. South Dakota, Alaska and Arkansas aren’t exactly liberal bastions. People across the ideological spectrum have spoken pretty clearly on what needs to be done here: People need a raise.
BPR: The 20 wealthiest nations in the world guarantee their workers paid parental leave. However, all but three US states do not. What is the Department of Labor doing to bring the United States up to speed?
TP: It’s unconscionable that we’re the only industrialized nation on the planet that has no federal paid leave. It’s hurting our competitiveness as a nation. For instance, when you look at the year 2000 and compare female labor force participation of prime age women — that’s ages 25 to 54 — the United States and Canada were identical. You now look to 2014 and Canada is about eight points higher. If we had maintained pace with Canada, we would have five and a half million more women in the workplace. That would be five and a half million more women contributing to the innovation economy. That would enable all of those Silicon Valley companies, tech companies and Wall Street companies, which all have pretty serious gender issues, to have access to that talent pool. What is most interesting to me about this issue of paid leave is that countries that are led by conservative governments and countries that are led by progressive governments are all leading forwards on paid leave because it is an economic imperative…I was at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Frankfurt last week. I asked the business owners there: If you had the opportunity to repeal Germany’s paid leave law, would you do so? The answer in a nanosecond was absolutely not. This is an indispensable part of our ability to maintain competitiveness. It is in our enlightened business self-interest. And it’s in our national interest. Both the minimum wage and paid leave, when you look at them through a global frame, have conservative and progressive support. Governments across the world are raising the minimum wage and putting paid leave policies into place. It’s only in the United States that we’ve allowed these two issues to become partisan issues.
BPR: Now that Congress is led by the Republicans, what are the prospects for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform in the remainder of President Obama’s second term?
TP: The president will take executive action, as he has said recently. He also said that there’s no substitute for Congressional action. The bill that the Senate passed on a bipartisan basis was very much in the spirit of prior bipartisan efforts such as those from the mid-’90s with Ted Kennedy and Alan Simpson, and those in the ’80s under Ronald Reagan. This has always been a bipartisan issue, and the president would love nothing more than not to have to take executive action. But Speaker Boehner wasn’t able to deliver his caucus even though, if he had put it to an up-or-down vote, they would have voted for it. Instead, he was hostage to the Tea Party fringe of the House caucus. That’s bad for America. That’s bad for our economic competitiveness. There are few issues that unite the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce, but immigration reform is one of them.