By Will Brown
Connecticut Post, Feb 26, 2014. Stamford Advocate, Danbury News Times, Greenwich Time
... Wednesday afternoon, DeLauro, Pelosi and other backers announced they are using a discharge petition to try to pry the minimum-wage increase out of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, where it has languished for nearly a year. ... Such a petition requires a majority vote of the House to successfully move the bill from the committee to the floor. ...
Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.), who filed the petition, said, "That's all we're asking for -- the opportunity to vote on a piece of legislation that 71 percent of the American people support." ...
Jon Cooper, president of Spectronics, a Westbury, N.Y., producer of ultraviolet technology, and Carmen Ortiz Larsen, owner of AQUAS Inc. of Bethesda, Md., a business solutions provider, spoke to their reasons for supporting the minimum-wage increase.
Cooper said raising wages will help drive spending and added that paying higher wages at his company has helped him succeed in business.
"Fair wages are part of the formula for success for my company, and raising the minimum wage will help America succeed as well," Cooper said.
Ortiz Larsen said she has raised wages to the point where the lowest paid worker she has, an intern, makes $10 an hour. She said that as a result, work attendance is higher, staffers are more reliable, retention rates are higher and morale is good.
"In short, my company is better because of this change," Ortiz Larsen said. ...
DeLauro said raising the minimum wage would help fix a broken promise to the American people. "Low wages and low social mobility are not a crisis because some people are rich and many are not. They are a crisis because the compact has been broken that allowed hard work to pay off and future generations to do better."
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