The GOP in the Senate derailed the push to advance the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, including a no vote by Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, despite her public chatter about wanting to raise the minimum wage.

Republicans said the amount is too much, and could cause the loss of half a million jobs across the country. But in countries where the minimum wage has been raised, those fears haven’t been realized. In Australia, a rise in the minimum wage created a stronger economy; indeed, Australia was one of the few countries to escape the worst of the 2008 recession, in part because its workers had more savings. Australia hasn’t had a recession in 20 years. Most developed countries have a higher minimum wage than the U.S. has, and better social safety nets, too.

Somehow, those economies do fine when workers are paid a living wage. Perhaps there are minor issues — such as having to raise the price of a Big Mac by 23 cents, higher, as it is in Australia. But people who work for MacDonalds can afford them now, and the small price increase isn’t hurting anyone.

In the case of the U.S. Congress, which will work a few hours a week for full salary on the taxpayer’s dime, there was no chance that a minimum wage bill would have even made it for a vote in the House, which makes it all the more curious why someone like Sen. Collins, who says she supports a strong minimum wage increase for the 3.3 million Americans who currently work full time and still exist below the poverty level, would feel she had to vote with the party against it.

Well, except of course, that she is running for re-election and needs to galvanize the base in Maine, which has questions about her Republican credentials anyhow.

The federal minimum wage in the U.S. hasn’t budged since 2009.

It’s meaningful, and really quite sad, that Collins and the rest of the GOP — except for Sen. Corker of Tennessee, and good for him — would vote against American workers on the International Workers Day, a celebration of laborers and the working class that is honored almost everywhere in the world.

Except for the United States, of course, whose “Labor Day” in September is rarely marked with so much as a heartfelt rendition of “The Union Maid” in a public forum.

We get it: Labor in the U.S. is an afterthought, a commodity to be bought and sold by Capital, which is really running affairs … not only in the business arena, but in the hallowed halls of the Capitol as well.

Even so, it strikes us as unfortunate that mere days after Collins accepted the endorsement of four unions earning considerably more than minimum wage, but workers of the world nonetheless, she would refuse to cast what she knew would be a meaningless vote in favor of the working poor.

The vote would have cost her nothing; it would have been a mere gesture, a token.

And it would have been taking a vanishingly small baby step toward something that Collins already says she believes in — higher pay for workers — despite her mixed voting record on the subject.

Like her votes in 2005, when she refused to vote to lift the minimum wage by $2.10. That measure had broad bipartisan support. Her vote in 2007 to vote yes on a procedural question to move a minimum wage was a token vote; she knew that it would not pass the 60 vote threshold needed.

The workers of the world — well, at least of Maine — watched the minimum wage debate with grim fascination. In what universe, we wonder, should millionaire part-timers whose salaries the workers are paying be voting to keep the wages of the working poor at the bottom of the developed world?