Marking the 75th anniversary of the nation’s cornerstone wage law, Vice President Joe Biden told a White House audience that included a number of minimum wage workers:

It’s time to raise the minimum wage and keep faith with the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama  called on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 an hour—the rate since 2009—to $9 an hour and to tie it to increases in the cost of living.  

About two-thirds of minimum wage workers are women, and Biden said:

It’s about time we stop treating work in fields where women are the majority as less valuable than in male-dominated fields.

Women are almost 2/3 of workers making minimum wage and 60% of women are bread winners. If we #RaiseTheWage, we help support families.

— Nancy Pelosi  (@NancyPelosi) June 25, 2013

In a column on Politico  today Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who, along with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), has proposed legislation to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, wrote:

Today’s federal minimum wage, which has not budged since 2009, is just $7.25 an hour. It is not a fair minimum wage but a poverty wage. It has nearly one-third less buying power than it did at its peak in 1968, and a single parent with two children—who works a full-time minimum wage job—falls $3,000 below the poverty line. It is simply wrong that in a nation as rich as ours, people who go to work every day are unable to put food on the table, pay the electricity bill or keep up with the rent.

Along with the vital need to raise the minimum wage, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says:

Another urgent task is to end the exclusion of home care workers from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime protections. The Labor Department has proposed new rules that would raise wages and improve working conditions for workers who provide in-home care and services to the elderly disabled, but these protections have been bottled up by opposition from industry.

Read his full statement .

Both the Obama proposals and the Harkin–Miller bill call for increasing the tipped minimum wage that is currently $2.13 an hour for workers who earn tips.

Raising tipped & full min wage would lift millions of Latinos & African Americans out of poverty. http://t.co/QijER8Mxhf #RaiseTheWage

— ROC United (@rocunited) June 25, 2013

Earlier today the National Women’s Law Center  hosted a live TweetChat  on raising the minimum wage. You can see the tweets here .