Wages have lagged prices for years and gig work now employs tens of millions with no safety net — should Washington raise the wage floor, rewrite who counts as an employee, or get out of the way?
Each issue breaks into the specific questions Congress actually fights over. Read each position, then head to the interactive version of this issue to mark which reflects your view and build a message to your representatives.
Wage growth is already cooling just as job growth slows — exactly when a wage floor increase would matter most. The federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 since 2009 — the longest stretch without an increase in the law's history — while the June 2026 jobs report showed wage growth cooling to 3.5% year-over-year alongside the weakest month of job growth in over a year. The Living Wage for All Act's phased path to $25 an hour, indexed afterward to two-thirds of the national median wage, is what it actually takes to let a full-time worker live on what they earn.
A cooling labor market makes the size of any increase a live question, not just whether one should happen at all. There's a real gap between $7.25 (plainly too low almost everywhere) and $25 (a five-fold jump with uncertain effects on small-business hiring), and June 2026's weaker-than-expected job growth and falling labor-force participation make the debate over how much the labor market can absorb more than theoretical. The competing bills in this Congress cluster in the $12-to-$17 range over five or six years, with automatic adjustment afterward — a range built to keep pace with inflation without guessing at what a cooling labor market can absorb.
A slowing labor market is exactly the wrong moment to add a new mandatory cost to hiring. A federally mandated wage floor can't account for the enormous cost-of-living differences between rural Mississippi and San Francisco, and June 2026's cooling job growth is a reminder that large, fast increases have historically cost the lowest-skilled workers their first rung on the ladder. Wage growth is better left to a tight labor market, state and local law, and targeted tools like the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Millions of drivers would keep none of the baseline protections employees take for granted. The Department of Labor's February 2026 proposal to loosen independent-contractor rules would let app-based platforms like Uber and DoorDash keep classifying millions of drivers as contractors with no minimum wage, overtime, or unemployment insurance. That reverses a 2024 rule written to catch workers who are economically dependent on one company in all but name.
Neither workers nor the businesses that hire them can plan around a rule that keeps flipping every few years. Four different classification tests in four presidential administrations is not a stable rule for either workers or the businesses that hire them. A bright-line federal standard — regardless of exactly where the line falls — would end the pattern of each new administration rewriting the test and each rewrite ending up in court.
A test with no clear priority among its factors isn't a standard — it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. The 2024 rule's multi-factor 'economic reality' test gave no single factor priority, effectively daring businesses to guess wrong and get sued. Restoring a standard centered on the worker's actual control over their schedule and profit opportunity protects the flexibility that most gig workers say is the reason they choose the work in the first place.
Three out of four workers are one family emergency away from unpaid leave or no leave at all. Only about a quarter of U.S. workers have access to paid family leave through their employer, and the federal government still guarantees none. The 45S tax credit only reaches workers whose employer already chooses to offer leave — it does nothing for the large share of the private-sector workforce whose employer doesn't.
Making the credit permanent and expanding eligibility is real progress, even though it's still voluntary, not guaranteed. Making the employer tax credit for paid leave permanent — which Congress did in 2025 — is real progress, but it's a voluntary incentive, not a guarantee. Expanding eligibility to workers with as little as six months' tenure and part-time employees, as the most recent bipartisan bill does, extends the benefit without mandating a new employer cost.
A single national mandate treats a five-person shop and a Fortune 500 company as if they can absorb the same cost. A federal paid-leave mandate would impose a new, one-size-fits-all cost on every employer regardless of size or industry. The tax-credit model — voluntary, funded through the tax code, and now made permanent — lets employers who can afford to offer leave do so competitively, without penalizing small businesses that can't.
Winning a union election is only half the fight if an employer can stall the actual contract for years. Union membership has fallen to a record-low 9.9% of the workforce, and even when workers do vote to unionize, employers can drag out first-contract negotiations for years — Buffalo Starbucks baristas and Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers who unionized in 2021 and 2022 still don't have contracts. The PRO Act's full rewrite of federal labor law, including a fast track to a first contract, is overdue.
Splitting off the least controversial piece of a stalled bill actually got it through the House. The single most concrete, popular piece of the PRO Act — a fixed timeline of mediation then arbitration to force a first contract once workers vote to unionize — passed the House with Republican votes in mid-2026 on its own. That happened without the PRO Act's more contested provisions like overriding state right-to-work laws.
Forcing federal arbitrators to write contract terms, and overriding state right-to-work laws, takes away workers' own choices. Forcing federal arbitrators to write private contract terms when parties can't agree substitutes government judgment for good-faith negotiation. Overriding right-to-work laws in 27 states — as the full PRO Act would — takes away individual workers' choice not to pay union dues even where their state has decided they shouldn't have to.
Millions of salaried workers earning as little as $35,600 a year are now classified as exempt from overtime pay entirely. In May 2026, the Department of Labor quietly rolled the federal overtime salary threshold back to $684 a week — about $35,600 a year — undoing a 2024 rule that would have raised it toward $58,656. That leaves millions of salaried workers earning as little as $35,600 a year classified as 'exempt' from overtime pay entirely.
Reverting to the old number without any indexing mechanism just restarts the same problem that made an update necessary. The 2024 rule's automatic three-year update mechanism was itself a reasonable fix to a threshold that had gone years without adjustment. Reverting to $684 without replacing it with any indexing mechanism just restarts the same problem the update was designed to solve.
A sudden, steep jump would have hit small nonprofits and lower-cost regions hardest, not just big-city employers. The 2024 rule's sharp, two-step increase to over $58,000 would have forced many employers — especially in lower-cost regions and nonprofits — to either raise salaries well above local market rates or reclassify long-tenured salaried employees as hourly. Returning to the pre-2024 standard restores the level courts had already left in place after blocking the 2024 rule.