[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 85 (Wednesday, June 18, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H3869]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      THE REPUBLICAN COMPANY STORE

  (Mr. KLINK asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. KLINK. Mr. Speaker, in the last Congress we had a debate about 
minimum wage. There were many people in the Republican leadership that 
got up and took the well and said that they were opposed to increasing 
the minimum wage. It caused me at that point to muse that somewhere 
between Abraham Lincoln and Newt Gingrich the Republican Party had 
changed its opinion of slavery.
  Eventually we decided in a bipartisan fashion to give America's 
lowest paid workers a raise. We increased the minimum wage. Now as we 
are in the process of getting some 1 million people from welfare into 
workfare by a time certain, the Republicans have changed their mind 
again. They have decided that slave labor guaranteed by the Federal 
Government is all right, that those people that we are moving from 
welfare to workfare should not be paid a minimum wage.
  We are time-limiting their welfare benefits, forcing them into the 
work force but not guaranteeing them a minimum wage. Thus we are 
trapping those same people economically. This really is a Republican 
version of the old company store, when at the end of the year the 
workers owed the company store more than they had paid; so what we are 
telling these people is: At the end of the year, you will owe us for 
the benefit we gave you of being able to work.
  To the Republicans I say, ``Get real.''

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