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Erica Payne remarks to One Fair Wage Coalition (2025 DNC Winter Meeting)

“So nice to see everybody. As Saru said, I run an organization that is comprised of millionaires. These are people who have incomes of over $1,000,000 or assets of over $5,000,000. We have hundreds of members here in the United States, as well as a chapter in the U.K., and a new chapter this year in Canada.

Our members believe two basic things are wrong with this country. Number one: working people don’t make enough money. And number two: rich people don’t pay enough in taxes.

And that those two basic dynamics have created the preconditions for an oligarchical coup we witnessed on January 20th, and the rise of an authoritarian leader like Donald Trump.

The inequality is the problem. We have been, for decades, playing a game of economic Jenga (the wooden block game). Hold from the bottom, hold from the middle, load it on the top, and don’t be surprised when the whole thing falls down.

Now, I want to be clear. We don’t approach our work from a point of altruism. Our Chairman says, ‘I am not any more altruistic than the next person. I am just greedy for a fundamentally different kind of country than some other rich people are greedy for.’

And the only way to have that country, the only way our members are going to reach their goal to be rich Americans in a rich, prosperous and stable nation, is to raise the wage floor to the cost of living, to raise the wage to the median cost of living in this country, which is currently $20 an hour, $40,000 annually, and to significantly raise taxes on people with incomes of over $1 million or assets of over $5 million.

That is the work that we are doing. And I want to emphasize we do this, again, not from altruism. Our members are business leaders. They are millionaires. They are investors.

Now, think to yourself, if you are a bar owner, should you care more about how much beer money every customer in your bar has on a Saturday night, or how much you are paying a single bartender serving those customers?

We care about having customers with money to spend because consumer spending is 70% of this economy. Now, unfortunately, as I stand here today with Democrats throughout the building, I want to say Democrats have failed to recognize basic math. Since Bill Clinton, the best Republican president since Ronald Reagan, took office in ’92 and then signed NAFTA, cutting the legs out from underneath working people, the Democratic Party has been on a slow march into the wilderness it currently finds itself.

And our group came together when President Obama, another Democrat, attempted to cut taxes on millionaires. We stood by in horror as a Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, gave three speeches to Wall Street for $750,000. And we were absolutely horrified when eight Democrats joined with every Republican in the House and Senate to vote down a $15 minimum wage at a point in American history when 1 million people we insisted were essential were dying.

And that is when we decided we had had enough with Democrats and Republicans. They were three Democrats in office right now – Maggie Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen, and Chris Coons, as well as Angus King, who is an independent, who had refused to raise wages for working people and continue to raise and continue to refuse to do that.

They do it based on this issue of tips. I’ve got a tip for them. If you sign a law saying that you believe people should make more money, but the mechanism through which they make money makes that not happen, you have not passed a good law. That’s right.

In Maryland one afternoon, I went to three different restaurants. I spoke to three different servers. I said, has there ever been a day when you made less than the state minimum wage from tips 100%?Three out of three said yes. When I shared that with the lawmakers, they insisted that those workers do make that money.

Who do you think knows whether somebody is making money or not making money, the person making it or the lawmaker trying to say something about it?

Okay. So we have a Democratic problem and we aim to fix that Democratic problem. If Democrats want to win back the working class vote, they need to put the working class people at the center of their political agenda.

Let me ask you a question. Do you believe that if Kamala Harris had stood in front of the country and demanded that $15 amendment go in that COVID relief package, if she had stood up for working people on that day as tens of thousands of them were dying, do you think there’s any possibility that Donald Trump would have won every single demographic of working people in this country?

No. Kamala Harris would be president today and we would not be facing the most existential threat to democracy that we have faced ever.

Our country turns 250 years old in two years. The economy is changing. We’ve got automation and AI, globalization and thousands of other factors that are putting pressure on working people. In this last election, they were finally heard. They have a moment. We have a moment.

Let’s seize this moment. Working people in America have more power today, more political power today than they have in years. Grab it to raise the wage for candidates that’s strong enough to hold a ladder to the middle class. That is what we want to see.

Raising the wage floor, solidifying the wage floor, is the single most efficient way to deliver resources directly into the pockets of American people. It is the single most efficient way to stabilize this nation for the long term, and it is the only way to permanently connect the fortunes of American families to the fortunes of American business.

And so from a group of hundreds of millionaires, hundreds of business leaders and investors, we urge Democratic leaders and their Republican counterparts not to see how little you can pay people, but to push how much you can pay people.

Let’s maximize the minimum. Let’s raise the wage floor to something that somebody can live on, and let’s build the nation we all deserve to live in.”