Tim Kaine talks jobs in Daytona Beach, full speech transcript
Point four, work/family. Boy, it’s complicated now. I mean, people work multiple jobs – husbands and wives or partners are working and they’re juggling family life and that’s complicated, and kids are working. And so we want to have policies that enable that work/family balance to really matter. Do you know right now the minimum wage number? It’s […]. Donald Trump has said he thinks wages are too high. I don’t think that he meant his own wage was too high. I think he was saying that other people’s wages are too high for some reason, who make like one-thousandth of what he makes. That’s too high, I guess. Wages are too high. And he’s also saying that he doesn’t believe in a federal minimum wage. Well, we do believe in a federal minimum wage and we think we got to raise it. We got to raise it. We have to raise it because if we tell people work is important – work hard. That’s one of the American messages, right? But you set a minimum wage, so that if somebody works full time for minimum wage and have a dependent, then they’re below the poverty level. Well, wait a minute, were we just pitching a line to people when we said work hard? Our actions don’t match our words. If we think work’s important, then we ought to value work and we ought to value workers, and one of the ways to do that is to have a minimum wage so that people cannot live in poverty but can work and do dignified work and have a good wage.
We’ve got to, finally, make sure that women get paid equally for equal work. I mean, this is a – this is not just a fundamental issue of equality, obviously, but it’s also an issue of family economics. I mean, all of us having working wives, working sisters, working mothers, working daughters. You could be a man, but pay equity for women is critical to your own economics. So It’s about fairness, but it’s also about letting families be able to survive and honoring people for the work that they do.
