[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 17 (Friday, January 27, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1704-S1705]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           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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