[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 59 (Thursday, May 2, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4614-S4615]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, the American people are baffled by the 
continuing, relentless, Republican opposition to a fair increase in the 
minimum wage. A raise of 90 cents an hour for America's lowest paid and 
hardest-pressed workers is so fundamentally fair and reasonable that it 
is hard to imagine why anyone would oppose it.
  Our Republican friends are hoisted by their own hypocrisy. They 
preach the value of work, but they reject a living wage. The minimum 
wage has not been raised in 5 years. It is stuck at $4.25 an hour, 
$8,500 a year--not even enough to lift a family out of poverty.
  There is even more hypocrisy than that. Republican Senators have 
voted for three pay raises themselves in that 5-year period--thousands 
of dollars for themselves, but not one dime for families struggling to 
survive on the minimum wage.
  Senator Dole has compiled, to put it mildly, an interesting voting 
record on the minimum wage during his career in Congress. His position 
appears to depend on the fads of politics, or perhaps the phases of the 
Moon. The only consistency is that there is no consistency.
  Arriving in Congress as a freshman in the House of Representatives in 
1961, he took an extreme antiminimum wage position against President 
Kennedy's proposal to raise the minimum wage. At the time, the minimum 
wage had not been increased since 1955. An increase was one of the 
first priorities of President Kennedy's New Frontier, and Congress 
responded quickly and favorably.
  Tomorrow--Friday, May 3--is the 35th anniversary of Bob Dole's vote 
against the bill, which President Kennedy signed into law on May 5, 
1961, and which raised the minimum wage from $1 to $1.25 an hour.
  In fact, the minimum wage had been one of the key issues in the 
Kennedy-Nixon 1960 Presidential campaign. As a Senator in 1960, 
President Kennedy had led a battle to raise the minimum wage, but 
Congress failed to act when House-Senate conferees deadlocked in a 
post-convention session in August 1960. President Kennedy then took the 
issue to the country, and in a TV ad that fall opposing Vice President 
Nixon's position, he stated:

       Mr. Nixon has said that a $1.25 minimum wage is extreme. 
     That's $50 a week. What's extreme about that? I believe the 
     next Congress and the President should pass a minimum wage 
     for a $1.25 an hour. Americans must be paid enough to live.

  Bob Dole and Richard Nixon were wrong to oppose President Kennedy's 
minimum wage increase 35 years ago--and Bob Dole and Richard Armey are 
wrong to oppose President Clinton's minimum wage increase today.
  At least once a decade since then, however, Senator Dole has voted 
the other way and supported an increase in the minimum wage. He did so 
in the 1970's, and again in the 1980's. And I urge him to do so now in 
the 1990's.
  Seven years ago, Senator Dole and many of the same Republicans who 
are now leading the opposition to a 90-cent increase in the minimum 
wage supported precisely that--a 90-cent increase.

[[Page S4615]]

  Senator Dole supported it. Congressman Newt Gingrich supported it. 
The Senate voted 89 to 8 in favor of the increase. The House of 
Representatives voted 382 to 37 in favor of the increase. In fact, 80 
percent of the Republicans in Congress in 1989 voted for a 90-cent 
increase in the minimum wage, and Republican President George Bush 
signed it into law.
  In 1989, the minimum wage equaled $3.35 an hour. At that time, after 
adjusting for inflation, it was at its lowest level since 1955. That's 
why there was overwhelming bipartisan support for a fair increase.
  The minimum wage is now $4.25 an hour, but once again, it is nearing 
a 40-year low. If Senator Dole and our Republican friends could support 
a fair increase in the minimum wage as recently as 1989, when its value 
had sunk to its lowest point since 1955, why can't they support a fair 
increase in 1996, when its value is once again reaching its lowest 
point since 1955?
  Our Republican friends say, ``Oh dear, we're worried that many of 
those nice young hard-working men and women will lose their jobs if we 
raise the minimum wage.'' Spare us those crocodile tears. A hundred and 
one of the Nation's most respected economists say that raising the 
minimum wage by the 90 cent's I'm proposing won't cause any significant 
job loss. The only real tears that our Republican friends are shedding 
are for business profits, not workers' jobs.
  In fact, a great deal more evidence is available today about the job 
effect of a minimum wage increase than was available in 1989. Studies 
of the 1989 Federal increase, as well as studies of recent State 
increases above the Federal level, provide no evidence that these 
increases have had a significant adverse effect on jobs.
  Professor Richard Freeman of Harvard University--one of the Nation's 
preeminent economists--concluded in a review of these studies:

       . . . at the level of the minimum wage in the late 1980s, 
     moderate legislated increases did not reduce employment and 
     were, if anything, associated with higher employment in some 
     locales.

  Professor Freeman goes on to say that the fact that ``moderate 
increases in the minimum wage transferred income to the lower paid 
without any apparent adverse effect on employment . . . at the turn of 
the 1990s is no mean achievement for a policy tool in an era when the 
real earnings of the less skilled fell sharply.''
  These studies have convinced the overwhelming majority of leading 
economists to support a minimum wage increase. In the fall of 1995, 101 
economists, as I have mentioned--including three Nobel Prize winners--
signed a strong statement of support for a higher minimum wage.
  Even the Employment Policies Institute Foundation--a think-tank which 
is funded primarily by the restaurant industry and which is vigorously 
opposed to an increase in the minimum wage--was forced to admit in a 
paper by Kevin Lang of Boston University that ``this author can find 
little effect on employment levels from changes in the minimum wage.''
  This strong support from leading economists for a moderate increase 
in the minimum wage was not available in 1989. The quantity of evidence 
of the substantial benefits and the negligible costs of raising the 
minimum wage was not available at that time. And yet, Senator Dole, 
Speaker Gingrich and many other Republicans who are leading the 
opposition to a higher minimum wage today were still able to vote for a 
minimum wage increase in 1989.
  Some opponents of an increase today argue that the 1989 increase was 
more acceptable because it set a lower minimum wage for teenagers 
working at their first jobs. The 1989 legislation included a so-called 
training wage which expired in 1993. It permitted employers to pay 
teenage workers 85 percent of the minimum wage for up to 90 days.
  But again, we know now what we did not know in 1989--the youth 
subminimum wage was a failure. The Labor Department submitted a study 
to Congress in 1993 summarizing three surveys which found that very few 
employers actually used the subminimum wage. In the 27 States where 
State law allowed employers to pay a subminimum wage, not more than 5 
percent of employers chose to use it.
  Employers did not like the youth subminimum wage, and they did not 
use it. They did not use it because they could not find workers willing 
to work for that low a wage. Also, employers did not want two workers, 
side-by-side doing the same job, with one paid less because he or she 
was younger than the other.
  The youth subminimum provision cannot explain the change of heart of 
those in Congress who supported a minimum wage increase in 1989 but 
oppose it today.
  Issues do not get any clearer than this. More than 80 percent of all 
Americans support an increase in the minimum wage. In every segment of 
our society and every region of the country, a large majority of 
Americans want a fair increase in the minimum wage.
  It is easy to understand why raising the minimum wage has such broad 
support among the American people. You don't have to be a rocket 
scientist to understand this issue, because it is an issue of 
fundamental fairness. One of the major challenges of 1996 is the 
economic insecurity facing the vast majority of families. Americans are 
working harder and earning less. They hear the talk about prosperity, 
but they do not see it in their lives. Millions of families feel left 
out and left behind, and those at the bottom of the ladder are being 
left the farthest behind.
  A simple vote in the Senate can change all that. Our message is 
clear--raise the minimum wage.
  The economic evidence supports an increase in the minimum wage. The 
American people support an increase in the minimum wage. A majority in 
the Senate and the House support an increase in the minimum. The time 
has come for an up-or-down, yes-or-no vote on increasing the minimum 
wage.
  Let the Senate vote. Raise the minimum wage. No one who works for a 
living should have to live in poverty.

                          ____________________