[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 18 (Thursday, February 8, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Page S1215]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       RESTORING THE MINIMUM WAGE

  Mr. ROCKEFELLER. Mr. President, today I rise to voice my support of 
Senator Kennedy's effort to restore the minimum wage. The Fair Minimum 
Wage Act of 2001 would raise the minimum wage by $1.50 in three 
incremental steps, benefitting over 11 million workers. We owe a pay 
raise to the hard-working Americans who would be affected by a minimum 
wage increase. To do so would demonstrate the real value of their hard 
work.
  Care givers in our preschools and nursing homes, service workers in 
our retail and restaurant industries, the domestic workers in our homes 
and offices--these are the real people upon whom each of us relies 
every day. These are the workers who deserve to have their wages 
restored to a level that will afford them a reasonable standard of 
living.
  In West Virginia alone, over one-fifth of our workers will directly 
benefit from a $1.50 increase in the minimum hourly wage. This would 
mean an increase of almost $3,000 a year for full-time workers. In more 
concrete terms, this translates into more than a year of groceries, 
rent for seven months, seventeen months of utility bills, or a year of 
tuition at a two-year college. Currently, a full-time minimum wage 
earner with two children may be faced with difficult decisions when 
trying to both feed and clothe her children. We need to make sure that 
a mother or father who works forty hours a week does not have to decide 
between groceries for the family and paying the electric bill.
  Ultimately, we must acknowledge that the minimum wage standard has 
been allowed to slowly erode over the past thirty years. At present, 
the $5.15 hourly minimum has reached its lowest purchasing power in two 
decades, which has aggravated problems for the working poor. Today, the 
real value of the minimum wage is $2.90 below what it was in 1968. As 
our country continues to make unprecedented economic gains, this is 
simply unacceptable. We have an obligation to the working families in 
West Virginia, and across the Nation, to raise the minimum wage to a 
level that will lift them out of the day-to-day struggle of meeting 
their most basic needs.
  I believe that raising the minimum wage over the next two years is 
essential to help families and to reinforce the fundamental American 
values of hard work and self-sufficiency. The goal of the country's 
minimum wage is to ensure that working Americans earn a living wage 
that makes work a truly better choice than welfare or other public 
assistance. The fact that 70 percent of workers earning minimum wage 
are adults over the age of twenty, that 60 percent are women, and that 
nearly half have full-time jobs means that this is an issue central to 
millions of hard-working families in our country. In West Virginia 
alone, almost 14 percent of our work force earn at the minimum wage, 
and our state has one of the largest populations of workers receiving 
the minimum wage. I am proud to join Senator Kennedy and my colleagues 
to work together to enact this essential bill for working Americans.

                          ____________________