Lisa Quinn is unemployed and expecting a daughter. “I’m really afraid,” she told U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro. “At $8.25 [per hour] how am I even going to feed her?”
Quinn joined other job-seekers at the Workforce Alliance job training center on Ella Grasso Boulevard Friday to talk to with the congresswoman about the minimum wage, which now stands at $8.25 an hour in Connecticut.
Quinn expressed concerns about finding a job after she has her child, a job that will allow her to support her family. Her story, and others like it, became prime exhibits in DeLauro’s argument for raising the minimum wage and restoring recently diminished parts of the social safety net.
DeLauro (pictured) has signed on to several bills that would raise the national minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Adjusted for inflation, today’s minimum wage is lower than it was in 1956.
Opponents of a minimum-wage increase say that it would harm the economy by increasing expenses for employers and lead to fewer new jobs being created.
DeLauro sought to dismantle those arguments Friday morning. Wearing black leather pants and a green leather jacket, DeLauro sat with about eight Workforce Alliance program participants.
Raising the minimum wage would create new jobs, DeLauro said. It’s the current minimum wage that’s bad for business, because workers don’t earn enough money to go out and shop, she argued.
As people in the room shared their stories, they revealed the wide range of difficulties that unemployed and low-wage workers can face — incarceration, lack of transportation, pregnancy, health problems — each of which compounds on the others, often leading to lives that skirt the edge of homelessness.
Elizabeth Carrillo, who’s 22, said she earned $8.25 an hour while working at Dunkin Donuts in 2011. She was able to get by because she lived with her mom. Then she had a child and had to stop working. She said she’s looking for a job now and doesn’t see how she can afford rent, heat, electricity, and childcare.
Quinn, who’s 37, said she’s eight months pregnant and facing the same questions. She said her mom has offered to help with childcare, but what if her mom gets sick?
Carrillo brought up the recent cut to food stamps, which has affected her and her mom.
“The dots need to get connected here,” said DeLauro. The combination of cuts to safety net programs and a stagnant minimum wage pinches families tighter and tighter. DeLauro said a current Senate bill would cut foodstamps further for people who are also getting heating assistance.
Bill Villano, head of Workforce Alliance, piped in with some statistics: One in five jobs lost during the economic downturn paid less that $15 per hour. But three in five jobs recovered pay less than $15 per hour. People returning to work are settling for lower paying jobs than they had before the recession.
“People will take what they can get,” said DeLauro.
Sometimes they can’t get anything. Stephanie Perez, who’s 37, said she’s been unemployed since 2006. She said she got tangled in a credit card fraud crime that sent her to prison. With that on her record, no one will hire her, she said.
Perez said she and her husband are both unemployed and she has a 2‑and-a-half-year-old daughter. They participate in a variety of assistance programs and still can’t make ends meet, she said.
“I can’t even give my 2‑year-old a Christmas gift this year,” Perez said, bursting into tears.
DeLaura gave her hug. “You’re a great mom,” she said to Perez.
“I can’t promise you anything,” DeLauro said, as the conversation wrapped up. “I will work as hard as I can” to raise the minimum wage. “We’re going to push and push and push.”
DeLauro later said that the bill’s chances are slim, under the current Republican leadership. “In the House it can’t go anywhere. The Republicans are not going to bring it up.”