Obama To Raise Federal Contractor Minimum Wage

President Barack Obama will sign an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 an hour, the rate he would like Congress to  extend to all U.S. workers. The move comes as the President readies for tonight’s State of the Union address, which many expect to center on the issue of income inequality, the root of much recent discussion on both the federal minimum wage and the federal tip wage. Raising the minimum wage was something Obama called on Congress to do during his January 2013 State of the Union, and the planned executive order appears to be a major first step in his new strategy to take whatever actions he can unilaterally rather than wait for an historically inert Congress.