John Fetterman slams outdated minimum wage laws that force people to live on $7.25 an hour

• Senate hopeful John Fetterman called out inaction on raising the minimum wage.
• "Another year, still no change to our shitty $7.25 an hour minimum wage," Fetterman said in a statement.
• The Pennsylvania Dem needled his GOP opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz over the minimum wage ahead of the midterms.

Senate Democratic hopeful John Fetterman has some choice words for the minimum wage.

"Another year, still no change to our shitty $7.25 an hour minimum wage," Fetterman said in a Monday statement. "And because of inflation, the minimum wage today is worth 27% less than it was worth 13 years ago, and 40% less than 1968."

The Pennsylvania Democrat also needled his GOP opponent Dr. Mehmet Oz over the minimum wage ahead of the November midterms. The Oz campaign didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sunday marked the 13th anniversary of the federal minimum wage being raised to $7.25 an hour — a rate it's stayed at ever since. While many states have taken matters into their own hands and raised minimum pay for their workers, several still rely on the federal minimum. 

Pennsylvania, where Fetterman is running for Senate, is one such state where the minimum wage is still the federal $7.25. Legislators there, including Governor Tom Wolf, have pushed for a higher minimum wage; under Wolf's proposal, the "embarrassingly low minimum wage" would've been raised to $12 an hour by July 1, and gone up to $15 by 2028.

Early last year, congressional Democrats initially sought to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour as part of their stimulus law. But it was ejected from the measure since a Senate official ruled that it violated procedural rules. There was also internal splits with eight Senate Democrats opposed. They haven't revisited the issue since.

Fetterman has said before that the minimum wage should be at least $15. In a February 2021 interview with The Hill, Fetterman said that supporting a $15 minimum wage is "a hill I would die on."

When a bipartisan group of senators began exploring a potential $11 minimum wage last year, Fetterman also called that "shitty."

"We need at least a $15 minimum wage. Not $11. $15. AT LEAST," he wrote in a Tweet. "If you're opposed to that, you should work and live on $11 an hour and demonstrate for the rest of us exactly how one can survive or feed a family on anything less than $15 an hour."

Then, he clarified: "$11 is less shitty, but still real shitty."