The advocacy group born from President Obama’s reelection campaign is launching a new national television advertisement advocating for a hike in the minimum wage.
{mosads}The commercial is the latest policy push from Organizing for Action, which has worked to rally voters on issues like gun control and extending emergency unemployment benefits.
“It’s harder than it should be to raise a family, [and] save for retirement,” the ad’s narrator says. “So President Obama is urging Congress to give America a raise. His plan raises the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and requires equal pay for women to boost family incomes.”
OFA did not disclose or immediately respond to a question about how much it was spending on the commercial, or where it would air. But if the group wanted to aggressively spend money on the campaign, it could — OFA banked $26 million last year in donations.
Obama has made the minimum wage hike one of his key rallying cries following his State of the Union address last week. On Wednesday, the president went to a Costco in suburban Maryland and said Congress needed “to catch up to the rest of the country” on the issue.
Obama said that “all our businesses work better when customers have more money to spend,” and that better wages for low-income workers “increase productivity and reduce turnover.”
“It will give businesses more customers with more money to spend,” Obama said. “I guarantee if workers have a little more money in their pocket, they’ll spend more money at Costco and if Costco sees more customers they’ll hire a few more folks.”
Some Republican lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have opposed the push, arguing it could hurt growth.
“There’s no question that the minimum wage increase, if not done in conjunction with some kind of incentives for the businesses not to lay off employees are going to dramatically increase unemployment,” McConnell told Fox News. “I don’t think in this jobless recovery, we ought to be doing things that creates fewer jobs. We ought to be doing things that create more jobs.”