Trump Open to Raising Minimum Wage

“You have to have something you can live on. But what I ‘m really looking to do is get people great jobs so they make much more money than that, much more money than the $15.”

The federal minimum wage is $7.25, but labor groups have been pushing for it to be raised to $15. During a November debate, Trump voiced opposition to raising the minimum wage. The Hill’s Ben Kamisar has more on Trump’s stance.https://bit.ly/23qla8s

“I don’t believe they should do it, and Puerto Rico is better off if they don’t because they will cut the bonds, they’ll cut them way down,” Trump said Wednesday during an interview with CNN about a plan to help the territory deal with its finances. Ben Kamisar has more here. https://bit.ly/24yK2NA

The measure of employee output per hour fell at a 1 percent annualized rate from January through March after a 1.7 percent decline in the fourth quarter. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey was for a 1.3 percent retreat. Labor costs jumped 4.1 percent, more than forecast.” https://bloom.bg/1q13YJt.

Private-sector employers increased hiring by 156,000 jobs last month, slower than the 194,000 in March, according to the ADP National Employment Report released on Wednesday.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said despite the soft numbers last month he doesn’t see any fundamental change in the labor market’s expansion and still expects the economy to reach full employment sometime this summer.
“The job market appears to have stumbled in April,” said Zandi, whose firm compiles the ADP data.

“One month does not make a trend, but this bears close watching as the financial market turmoil earlier in the year may have done some damage to business hiring,” he said. The Hill’s Vicki Needham has more: https://bit.ly/1SPodln.

Tonight’s highlights include concern for Puerto Rican healthcare, two major hacks and a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule on arbitration.

See something I missed? Let me know at slane@thehill.com or tweet me@SylvanLane. And if you like your newsletter, you can subscribe to it here:https://bit.ly/1NxxW2N.

The agency has scheduled a field hearing to discuss so-called forced arbitration in Albuquerque, N.M., on Thursday but would not say more about any announcements. Advocacy groups believe the rule is imminent.

At issue are forced arbitration clauses that are slipped into financial contracts and typically bar consumers from joining class action lawsuits. Instead, the clauses force consumers to resolve disputes on alleged abusive practices or unjustified fees, for example, through privately appointed individuals or an arbitrator — often chosen by the company. The Hill’s Lydia Wheeler tells us more: https://bit.ly/1NX7EHu.

In a new report, Democrats emphasize that Puerto Rico, grappling with a massive debt crisis, has already slashed its Department of Health budget by 15 percent from 2011 to 2015. With conservatives wary of signing on to a bill to help the island deal with its debt woes, Democrats are trying to take healthcare cuts off the table.

Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, which is handling the bill, instead are pushing for boosted health resources as the island faces an influx of the Zika virus. The Hill’s Peter Schroeder tells us what’s at stake: https://bit.ly/1Y9bspD.

Identity thieves used victims’ personal information obtained elsewhere to establish fraudulent registrations on ADP’s external online portal. The criminals were then able to download victims’ W-2 forms, which they may have used to file fraudulent tax returns, according to a letter U.S. Bank sent to some of its employees last month that was obtained by Krebs.

ADP told the site that the identity thieves hit a small group of the company’s customers and needed to have victims’ personal information to create the fraudulent registrations.

Adam Levin, chairman and founder of identity-protection company IDT911, said the data breach “may only be the tip of the iceberg” since ADP works with more than 640,000 companies: https://bit.ly/1SZgT9c.

The bank’s website was temporarily disrupted by a distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack, in which hackers force a server to crash by bombarding it with phony traffic.

“The attack lasted for a few minutes and was successfully tackled by the bank’s security systems,” a bank official told Reuters. “The only thing that was affected by the denial-of-service attack was our website.”

Anonymous has already taken responsibility for the attack in a YouTube video declaring the start of a 30-day operation targeting “the global banking cartel.” The Hill’s Katie Bo Williams tells us the rest: https://bit.ly/1X979vW.

Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said that despite a decline in the U.S. trade deficit in March, “exporters continue to battle economic headwinds that have hindered trade across the globe.”

“That is why President Obama and our entire administration continue to push for 21st century trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will ensure that U.S. businesses have greater access to even more fast-growing foreign markets around the world and can compete fairly against foreign competition,” she said.

The trade gap narrowed to $40.4 billion last month, a drop of 13.9 percent from February, the smallest shortfall since February 2015, when the deficit was $39 billion, the Commerce Department reported on Wednesday: https://bit.ly/1ZefqgU.