The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE PRESIDENT'S PROPOSAL TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the Senate section on pages S1704-S1705 on Jan. 27, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE PRESIDENT'S PROPOSAL TO RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE
Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the attached Las Vegas Sun article by Nevada's former Governor Mike O'Callaghan on President Clinton's proposal to raise the minimum wage be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Stop Whining; Pay Workers
Whine, whine, whine.
The sky is going to fall in if the minimum wage is raised. If you listen to the Republican-led whine choir, it assures us that small businesses will collapse and thousands of teenage hamburger flippers will be fired if the minimum wage rises from $4.25 to $5 an hour.
Let's be honest, any business today that doesn't have the ability to pay its workers $5 an hour probably should collapse if it hasn't already. You can't convince a thinking American that the newly suggested minimum wage will do anything but help the working poor and, in the long run, improve the economy. A quick glance at past minimum wage increases will show that they have been a plus, not a negative, for the working poor and the economy.
I was proud of President Bill Clinton when he said in his State of the Union address:
``Members of Congress have been here less than a month; 28 days into the new year, every member of Congress will have earned as much in congressional salary as a minimum-wage worker makes all year long.''
Earlier, he had pointed out that there are ``2\1/2\ million Americans, often women with children,'' who now work for
$4.25 an hour.
[[Page S1705]] Figure it out: These people, when employed full time, make $170 a week and less than $9,000 a year.
Try raising a family on these wages, when the poverty level for a family of four is $13,000 a year. In case the family breadwinner gets sick working for minimum wages, he or she most likely hasn't any medical coverage. The situation becomes a double tragedy.
Furthermore, the idea that only teenage fast-food workers are paid the minimum wage is wrong. Actually only about 30 percent of these workers are under 20. A much larger percentage is 25 years old and up. Yes, and 60 percent of the people struggling to get by on minimum wage are women. Many of them are
single parents.
As a governor, I heard all of the silly arguments against raising the minimum wage during the 1970s. Sometimes, it was like pulling teeth for Assemblywoman Eileen Brookman and state executives Stan Jones and Blackie Evans to convince legislators to move ahead with minimum-wage legislation.
Who are these hard-working Americans who labor for $4.25 an hour? According to writer Michael Gartner, the households with less than $10,000-a-year income give a greater percentage of their money to charity than do those who make
$75,000-$100,000 annually. They aren't a bunch of bums or freeloaders. They are men and women we should be proud of as fellow Americans who toil at jobs day after day to feed themselves and their families.
I remember my father working for a dollar a day during the Great Depression. Cutting and skinning trees for pulp from dawn to dark wasn't an easy task. Following that bit of exercise in the snowy and cold climate of Wisconsin, he came home to milk the cows and then go to bed, knowing that hours before the sun rose the next day, he had to milk them again before leaving for the woods.
Let the editors of USA Today give us a brief history of the minimum wage and bring us up to date:
``The first minimum wage law set a 25-cents-an-hour wage in 1938 in order to provide `a minimum standard of living necessary for health, efficiency and general well-being for workers.'
``And for most of the next four decades, the minimum wage provided that floor to earnings, as Congress raised it a dozen times--once every three or four years--to keep up with inflation.
``But then came the Reagan revolution. From 1979 to 1989, the wage was stuck at $3.35 an hour, losing nearly half of its purchasing power.
``The result: A wider gulf between rich and poor and an increasing reliance of working families on food stamps, tax credits and other welfare to make ends meet.
``The 90-cent increase implemented from 1989 to 1991 helped lift nearly 200,000 families from that situation, the Labor Department found. But it still left 18 percent of full-time workers earning less than poverty wages for a family of four--a whopping 50 percent increase from 1979.''
So stop the predictions of economic catastrophes and the whining that accompanies the voices against the minimum wage going to $5. It's long overdue, and anything less will only allow the continuation of one of our country's greatest injustices against the working poor.
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