[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 156 (Saturday, November 8, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2223-E2224]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E2223]]



         ``AMERICA STILL NEEDS A RAISE'' SPEECH BY BILL DAUSTER

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. PATSY T. MINK

                               of hawaii

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, November 7, 1997

  Mrs. MINK. Mr. Speaker, I submit an excellent speech relevant to our 
work here regarding the minimum wage. The author, Bill Dauster, is the 
Democratic deputy staff director and general counsel for the Senate 
Committee on Labor and Human Resources.
  Mr. Dauster has enjoyed a distinguished career working for 
congressional committees in the Senate. Mr. Dauster first came to the 
Hill in 1986 working with the Budget Committee. Mr. Dauster served as 
chief counsel and eventually Democratic chief of staff and chief 
counsel on the Budget Committee for 11 years before moving to the 
Senate Labor Committee where he currently works. Among his many 
accomplishments, Mr. Dauster has submitted various op-ed articles that 
have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Monthly, Roll 
Call, the Hill, and the Sunday Journal.
  On October 20, 1997, Mr. Dauster presented his speech at a forum 
exploring how golden today's U.S. economy is. I believe that it is 
deserving of broader exposure. I submit it for the Record.
  His speech is as follows:

       First let me ask your indulgence for a reading from the 
     book of Exodus:
       ``And it came to pass . . . that . . . mount Sinai was 
     altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in 
     fire: . . . and the whole mount quaked greatly. . . .
       ``And God spake all these words, saying, `I am the Lord thy 
     God . . . . Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
       `` `Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image . . . .
       `` `Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in 
     vain . . . .
       `` `Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days 
     shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; But the seventh day is 
     the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any 
     work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, 
     nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is 
     within thy gates . . . . ' ''
       But then spake a voice from the midst of the people saying, 
     ``Wait a minute, Lord!'' It was the President of the Nation 
     of Israel Chamber of Commerce, and he didst say, ``Hast Thou 
     not seen what happened to that Communist Pharaoh when he 
     didst introduce central planning into the economy, what with 
     the heavy corn taxation during the 7 plenteous years, and the 
     big government pyramid building project? And Egypt didst 
     collapse, and so willst Israel if Thou dost impose a 
     centrally-planned workseek upon us.''
       And the Lord God spake, saying, ``Enough with the name-
     calling! What ist thine point, exactly?''
       And the mouthpiece for the wealthy didst say, ``What Thou 
     talkest about ist an unfunded mandate on business. A weekly 
     day off doth conflict with the free market. Thou shouldest 
     leave vacation policy to free bargaining between Israelites. 
     It wouldst cover those not in need; teenagers needeth not a 
     Sabbath. Making a Sabbath wouldst create unemployment.''
       And the Lord said, ``Verily, thou art full of it!'' And the 
     Lord did make the earth open up and swallow the spokesman of 
     the moneyed interests, and resistance to sensible labor laws 
     did vanish forever from the face of the earth.
       If only, if only it were that easy. If only the Good Book 
     did tell of the victory of God's law--the oldest labor law--
     over the interests of wealth, then perhaps the road of labor 
     reformers since would not have been as hard.
       Instead, the Western world has been weaned on the economics 
     of Thomas Malthus, that population increase will necessarily 
     force wages to subsistence levels, and of David Ricardo that 
     ``[t]here is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping 
     wages down.'' Instead, the Western world has come to take 
     Capitalism as an article of faith, the same Capitalism that 
     Lord John Maynard Keynes defined as ``the extraordinary 
     belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, 
     will somehow work for the benefit of us all.''
       Yes, it has not been easy as generation after generation 
     battled for something more than subsistence wages to 
     compensate workers for their labor.
       It was not easy for the girls who labored at the Lowell, 
     Massachusetts, textile mills, like Harriet Hanson Robinson 
     and Sarah Bagley, who participated in one of America's first 
     strikes over wage rates. In 1834, at age 10, Harriet Hanson 
     Robinson went to work as one of ``[t]roops of young girls 
     [whom] men were employed to collect . . . at so much a head, 
     and deliver . . . at the factories.'' Harriet wrote that 
     ``the caste of the factory girl was the lowest among the 
     employments of women. . . . In the eyes of her overseer she 
     was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed 
     about.'' The mills paid the young women $2 a week for jobs 
     that kept them at the mills for nearly 14 hours a day. When 
     the mill announced in 1836 that it planned to cut their 
     wages, the young women went on strike and marched as one to 
     listen to incendiary speeches. But ``[t]he corporation would 
     not come to terms. The girls were soon tired of holding out, 
     and they went back to their work at the reduced rate of 
     wages.''
       And it was not easy for Sarah Bagley when she led the 
     petition drive that forced Massachusetts legislators to 
     examine the conditions there, in one of the first 
     governmental investigations of labor conditions. At a time 
     when women seldom spoke in public, Sarah testified fearlessly 
     before the Massachusetts legislature arguing for the 10-hour 
     day. Even though the legislature did not vote with the women 
     that day, Bagley helped to advance the 10-hour day movement, 
     which began to achieve success in the 1840s.
       And it was not easy for those who fought for the 8-hour 
     day, like Albert and Lucy Parsons. Lucy, born around 1853 of 
     African-American, Native-American, and Mexican ancestry, 
     married an Anglo man and moved to Chicago in 1873. Her 
     husband Albert, a newspaper printer by trade, became a leader 
     of the Chicago labor movement, while Lucy became an activist 
     with the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union. On May 
     1, 1886, to kick off the movement for the 8-hour day, 350,000 
     workers across the Nation walked off their jobs in a general 
     strike, more than 40,000 in Chicago alone. After police 
     shootings marred a strike 2 days later, radicals called a 
     rally in Haymarket Square. Over 2,000 attended, but after 
     numbers dwindled, an army of police marched on the crowd. A 
     radical threw a bomb into the police ranks, and a riot broke 
     out, injuring and killing both workers and police. Although 
     Albert was not even in Haymarket Square that day, he and 
     seven other men were accused and convicted of the bombing in 
     what a later Governor determined was a grossly irregular 
     trial. When Lucy brought her two children to see their father 
     for the last time, she was arrested, along with her kids, 
     taken to jail, forced to strip, and left naked with her 
     children in a cold cell until her husband had been hanged 
     dead. In tears upon her release, she vowed to continue to 
     fight injustice and served as a radical labor leader for 
     nearly 70 years.
       It was not easy for Clara Lemlich, a 16-year-old immigrant 
     garment worker, who at a meeting at New York's Cooper Union 
     in November 1909, stood and recited her hardships in the 
     sweatshops, galvanizing the audience with her call for 
     action. The impassioned crowd affirmed its solidarity with 
     the old Jewish oath, ``If I turn traitor to the cause I now 
     pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.'' A 
     garment workers' strike banner read, ``We are starving white 
     we work; we might as well starve while we strike!''
       And it was not easy for a young New York City researcher 
     and social reformer named Frances, who while visiting a 
     friend on March 25, 1911, suddenly heard the clanging of fire 
     engines close by. Rushing out to the street, she saw the top 
     floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company erupting in flames 
     and watched with horror as young women workers leaped to 
     their deaths. They had been crowded into lofts where the few 
     existing fire escapes were either inaccessible or stopped 
     several stories above the ground. The tragedy claimed 146 
     lives. The researcher, Frances Perkins, went on to become 
     President Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor.
       It was not easy for Caroline Gleason, whom Oregon employers 
     called ``an outrageous socialist,'' just because in 1912 she 
     began a survey for the Oregon Consumers' League of the 
     thousands who worked in abominable conditions to earn $8.25 
     for a 54-hour week. But Gleason had the satisfaction of 
     seeing her data aid passage of the country's first 
     enforceable wage-hour law, which became the model for the 
     Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
       It was not even easy for the Department of Justice when it 
     tried to enforce an 8-hour day and a 6-day week for a 14-year 
     old boy in a cotton mill at Charlotte, North Carolina, when 
     the 1918 Supreme Court held that such a law ``exerts a power 
     as to a purely local matter to which the federal authority 
     does not extend.''
       FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act fared no better 
     before the 1935 Supreme Court.
       It was not easy for the young Bedford, Massachusetts, women 
     who tried to pass President Franklin Roosevelt an envelope

[[Page E2224]]

     while he was campaigning for reelection in 1936. A policeman 
     threw her back into the crowd. ``Get the note from the 
     girl,'' Roosevelt told an aide. Her note read: ``I wish you 
     could do something to help us girls. . . . We have been 
     working in a sewing factor, . . . and up to a few months ago 
     we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week. . . . Today 
     the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a 
     week.'' When a reporter asked, the President replied, 
     ``Something has to be done about the elimination of child 
     labor and long hours and starvation wages.''
       It was not easy for FDR and his Labor Secretary Frances 
     Perkins to push the Fair Labor Standards Act through Congress 
     in 1937 and 1938, even though all that Act did in the end was 
     apply a 25-cent-an-hour minimum wage and 44-hour week to 
     roughly one-fifth on the workforce.
       And it was not even easy for Democrats to raise the minimum 
     wage in the last Congress, even though it had reached its 
     lowest value in 40 years, with the exception of one year 
     during the Bush administration. The Republican majority 
     sought to use the cloture rules to make the minimum wage 
     amendment out of order, but Democrats and moderate 
     Republicans stood together and prevailed.
       And despite that victory, America still needs a raise.
       Even now that the latest raise in the minimum wage has been 
     fully implemented, and it has reached the level where it 
     requires just over $10,000 year for a full-time job, its real 
     value remains below its level from 1956 through 1983.
       During those post-War years, the incomes of all Americans, 
     rich and poor, grew together. In the 1980s and after, 
     Americans have grown apart. America still needs a raise.
       In the 15 years from 1980 through 1995, the minimum wage 
     increased 37 percent. But during that same period, inflation 
     increased 86 percent, company profits increased 145 percent, 
     and CEO pay increased 499 percent. CEO pay increases to 5 
     times what it was before, and the Titans of industry still 
     complained that a little more than one-third increase in 
     the minimum wage would bankrupt the country! America still 
     needs a raise.
       Today I have told you stories of women workers, for theirs 
     has often been a hard lot. Pully three-fifths of all minimum 
     wage workers are women. American women still need a raise.
       On July 11, Senator Ted Kennedy introduced S. 1009, a bill 
     that would simply provide increases of 50 cents an hour in 
     the minimum wage in each of the next 3 years and, increases 
     of 30 cents an hour in each of the following 2 years. 
     Congressmen Bonior and Gephardt introduced H.R. 2211 to do 
     the same thing.
       Under these bills, the minimum wage would still remain 
     below its levels in the late 1960s.
       If this Congress could enact a 5-year budget deal to grant 
     sweeping capital gains and estate tax breaks for the 
     wealthiest among us for years into the future, then the least 
     that it can do is to give those earning the minimum wage a 
     raise for the next 5 years as well. America still needs a 
     raise.
       The successors of that imaginary Sinai desert businessman 
     will raise all the same imaginary objections to this labor 
     legislation, as well.
       They will argue that we endanger America's competitiveness. 
     But we shall stand with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said: 
     ``No business which depends for existence on paying less than 
     living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this 
     country. By living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence 
     level--I mean the wages of decent living.''
       They will say that we seek a centrally planned economy, 
     like the former Soviet Union. But we shall stand with Abraham 
     Lincoln, who said: ``To secure to each laborer the whole 
     product of his labor or as nearly as possible, is a worthy 
     object of any good government.''
       Yet again, the apologists for big business will cry that 
     the minimum wage is just an unfair mandate on business. But 
     we shall stand with Thomas Jefferson, who in his March 4, 
     1801, Inaugural Address said: ``Take not from the mouth of 
     Labor the bread it has earned.''
       And when big business cries that all must be left to the 
     sacred market, we shall stand with section 17 of the Clayton 
     Anti-Trust Act of 1914, which says: ``The labor of a human 
     being is not a commodity or article of commerce.''
       We shall stand with FDR, with Lincoln, with Jefferson, and 
     with the Clayton Antitrust Act.
       And we shall keep faith with the prayers of those American 
     women who fought so that all working women would receive fair 
     compensation for the sweat of their brow. We owe them nothing 
     less.
       We owe it to Harriet Robinson and Sarah Bagley and the 
     girls who sacrificed their youth to the Lowell Mills, to Lucy 
     Parsons, as she rose in tears from the cold jail cell floor 
     to swear an oath to fight on, and to Frances Perkins's memory 
     of her tears falling down like the girls who fell from the 
     Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Let us stand with Clara Lemlich, 
     and pledge to carry on the fight for the cause for which she 
     raised her arm.
       And so, with God's help and our own, may the oaths and the 
     prayers of the brave American women who fought before us find 
     an answer in our time.

     

                          ____________________