Clinton puts middle-class pay rises centre stage

Hillary Clinton's economic agenda will be organised in three parts. Photo / AP

Democratic frontrunner also aims to give women more flexibility to enter workforce.

Centring her presidential campaign on boosting incomes for middle-class Americans, Hillary Clinton tomorrow will begin unveiling an economic policy agenda designed to lift working families that have experienced years of wage stagnation and economic anxiety.

The Democratic frontrunner will lay out a diagnosis for why wages have been stuck and a framework to ensure economic growth benefits more ordinary workers, according to campaign officials.

Clinton will endorse a host of popular Democratic policies such as raising the minimum wage and investing more in infrastructure. She will emphasise proposals tailored towards working women, such as expanding access to child care and providing workers with paid family and sick leave. The ideas sound similar to the second-term agenda of President Barack Obama.. Clinton goes further in her emphasis on giving women more flexibility to enter the workforce and on new government efforts to change the investment and pay decisions of corporations.

Clinton's speech will cement a leftward shift in the Democratic Party. Clinton is carving out space between the Republican candidates, who pay more attention to growing the economy than to raising wages, and her leading Democratic primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, who focuses more on redistributing income to solve the inequality problem than on growth.

The US economy grew only 2.4 per cent last year, and over the past 15 years, growth has slipped well below the averages of the 1980s and 1990s.

Clinton's economic agenda will be organised in three parts: Breaking down barriers to joining the workforce, reducing income inequality and corporate reform. She will later roll out more details.

Liberal groups will be watching with a sceptical eye. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said he will listen to hear whether she takes on "the power of Wall Street and corporate bad actors. Do her proposals go big and represent game-changers in the lives of millions of people? Or do they go small and tweak around the edges?" Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist, said he thought she would satisfy progressives because her agenda "reconnects growth and middle-class prosperity."

Three Parts to Clinton's economic agenda
1. Breaking barriers to work Clinton will focus on women's participation in the workforce, previewing policies on child care, paid leave and paid sick days.

2. Reducing income inequalityShe will assert that the current economy unfairly rewards some work more than others. She will urge raising the minimum wage, fighting wage theft and overhauling the tax code to make the wealthiest Americans pay what she considers their fair share, as well as supporting collective bargaining and reducing health-care costs.

3. Corporate reformClinton plans to argue that companies should focus more on creating lasting value, including investing in their workers, than on earning quarterly profits to satisfy shareholders. To that end, she will call for more investments in research and development, changes in tax structure and new rules on shareholder activism.

- additional reporting Bloomberg