[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 173 (Monday, December 9, 2013)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8540-S8544]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MORNING BUSINESS
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the
Senate will be in a period of morning business until 4 o'clock p.m.,
with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.
Mr. REID. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BROWN. I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call
be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Minimum Wage
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, 75 years ago President Roosevelt signed the
Fair Labor Standards Act written, in
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part, by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama. He actually sat at this desk as
he was writing the minimum wage law and some of the Fair Labor
Standards Act legislation in the 1930s.
This legislation ensured that American workers would receive a
minimum wage and work reasonable hours. We know what that has done for
families in this country. We also know that the minimum wage hasn't
even been close to keeping up with the cost of living and with
inflation. We also know a number of other facts about the minimum wage.
The minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Many minimum wage workers are
working and making $7.25, $8 or $9--less than what we want to raise the
minimum wage to so all would get a raise. We know that many of those
workers work in the fast food industry.
The CEO of a fast food corporation makes about $8.7 million or $8
million a year, while his employees average something around $19,000 a
year.
I am not one of those who says they have to work a million hours to
get to the $8 million a year. To put into perspective what has happened
with wages, as wages for CEOs and top management have gone up, we have
seen the productivity of workers go up. We know that wages for those
workers have simply not kept up, not only for minimum-wage workers but
for workers overall.
Since the 1970s, and especially since 2000, profits have gone up,
productivity has gone up, executive salaries have gone up dramatically,
yet workers wages have been stagnant. There is no better example of
that than the minimum wage. The minimum wage was raised my first year
in the Senate.
My first speech on the Senate floor was with Senator Barack Obama
sitting in the Presiding Officer's chair. Senator Kennedy and Senator
Byrd were on the floor that day talking about and debating increasing
the minimum wage.
We did that in a bipartisan way in 2007. The bill was signed by
President Bush. That is good news.
The bad news is there was no cost-of-living adjustment. There was no
escalation so that the wage would keep up with inflation. There has not
been a minimum wage increase since then.
Here is another fact about the minimum wage. For tipped workers,
those who work in diners--in many cases those who work pushing
wheelchairs at airports don't work for the airlines. They work for a
subcontracting company that pays subminimum wage.
Valets and people who are in positions in hotels where they might get
tipped, their minimum wage is only $2.13 an hour. A woman working the
floors of a diner, a man who is pushing a wheelchair or driving a cart
in an airport, their minimum wage is only $2.13 an hour. Some are paid
more than that, but some of them are paid as little as $2, $3 or $4 an
hour, supposedly expecting that tips will make up the difference and
get them to the minimum wage or above.
The assistant majority leader, who has joined me on the floor, has
been working with Senator Harkin and several others of us on
legislation for the new minimum wage increase. We want to increase the
minimum wage $2.10 an hour, 90 cents at the President's signature, then
another 90 cents, and another 90 cents. We also want to increase the
tipped minimum wage--not increased for 22 years--to lock it in at 70
percent of the real minimum wage.
As the real minimum wage increases by the year 2016 under our
legislation, and a worker's minimum wage would then be $10.10 an hour,
a subminimum wage of a tipped employee in an airport or restaurant
would then be $7 and a few cents an hour. Both of those wages, the
tipped minimum wage and a minimum wage, will have a cost-of-living
adjustment so we don't have to come back every 6 years and have a big
political fight to raise the minimum wage. It shouldn't be a big
political fight because clearly people in this country overwhelmingly--
Democrats, independents, and Republicans--think the minimum wage should
be increased.
It will not only be the tipped employee or the minimum wage worker at
a fast-food restaurant who gets a raise from what is now $7.50 or $8 an
hour or even $9 an hour. As the minimum wage goes up, so will the wages
for many of low-income, slightly above minimum wage workers.
In a fast food restaurant where perhaps the night manager may make a
couple of dollars more an hour than the line workers who are at the
counter--although the night manager does plenty of that too--the night
manager might make a couple of dollars above or $3 above minimum wage.
There we raise the minimum wage, thus raising everybody's wage. Then
the night manager's wage will increase too.
The opponents to the minimum wage--and it is amazing to me that
people can sit in this institution, with the good salaries that we make
as Members of the Senate and Members of the House in both parties, with
good benefits, good health insurance, decent pensions paid for by
taxpayers, and oppose the minimum wage. It equally amazes me that they
can oppose extending unemployment benefits. In my State alone--and I
know in the assistant majority leader's State of Illinois and in the
Presiding Officer's State, for a significant number of people, over
120,000, in my State alone, their Christmas present will be that
unemployment benefits have stopped for them, have been eliminated,
unless Congress acts. That is why it is so important, not only to enact
a minimum wage in the weeks ahead but that we extend unemployment
benefits for those workers who are looking for jobs.
These aren't people who don't want to work. These are people looking
for jobs. They have to look for jobs in order to qualify. It is not a
lot of money. It is 40 or 50 percent typically of their wage, of what
they used to make.
There aren't enough jobs in this country. There aren't enough jobs in
Connecticut, Illinois, and Ohio that they can find jobs, and then we
take the unemployment benefits away.
No. 1, think of what it means to that family and, No. 2, as the
assistant majority leader knows, this helps our economy. When people
are receiving unemployment benefits, they are spending it. They are
spending it in Toledo at the grocery store. They are spending it in
Cleveland at the hardware store. They are spending it in Dayton at
the auto repair shop to fix their car, so they can go out, get a job,
and go to work. All of those are reasons why extending the minimum wage
and extending unemployment insurance is so important.
One further point before yielding to the assistant majority leader
from Illinois, unemployment is not called welfare, it is unemployment
insurance. People pay in when they are working. They hope they are
going to pay in for a long time and that they are not going to lose
their jobs. But if they lose their jobs, they collect their insurance.
They paid in. That is what insurance is. If things aren't working
right, one gets unemployment benefits, unemployment insurance, social
insurance. This is why this is so important.
I yield to the Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Will the Senator from Ohio yield for a question through
the Chair.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. I ask of the Senator from Ohio if he recalls that it was
not that long ago the issues that we are discussing were marginally
bipartisan issues. When it came to raising the minimum wage
periodically, Senator Ted Kennedy, who used to sit back at that desk,
led the effort. It would turn out to be a bipartisan vote to increase
the minimum wage.
Over the years, that reflected a bipartisan consensus that if one is
working for a living in America, they ought to be able to get by or at
least have a little bit put away for their future.
We are finding more and more that people working for a minimum wage
cannot get by. I listened to public radio over the break. There was a
lady on there who works in the hospitality industry, I believe, and
explained she was on food stamps. She said she had a small family and
made $7.25 an hour. With her children she still qualified for SNAP, the
food stamp program.
I did a quick calculation in my mind--I believe this is correct--and
she was making somewhere in the range of $14,000 to $15,000 a year at
$7.25 an hour, the minimum wage in many parts of the United States. She
still qualified for a helping hand to feed her children.
This is not a lazy person. This is a person who gets up and goes to
work. My guess is it is not an easy job. She is
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making $7.25 but still needs a helping hand.
I find it interesting that issues that used to be bipartisan to help
people such as her, working people, have now become too partisan. We
should have a bipartisan consensus that regularly we increase the
minimum wage in America to keep up with the cost of living. I hope we
all agree that if we have a working mom, who is doing her best, and
needs a helping hand to feed her children, food stamps should be
available to her.
Of the 47 million Americans receiving food stamps, 22 million of the
47 million are children, 1 million are veterans, and 9 million are
elderly and disabled. Three-fourths of the recipients of food stamps
fall into those categories: children, veterans, the elderly, and the
disabled. Yet we are up against a battle on the farm bill about whether
we are going to make deep cuts in food stamps. It seems to me this is
counterproductive. We should be helping working families--those who
struggle paycheck to paycheck--to get by, to at least feed their
children.
Going back to the point made by the Senator from Ohio, when we look
across the board at the vulnerability of working families, it is wages,
food on the table, and many times it turns out to be health insurance.
The number one reason for bankruptcy in America today is the failure of
people to be able to pay their medical bills.
What we are trying to do with the Affordable Care Act is to say to
everyone in my State, the 1.8 million uninsured people in Illinois, we
will give them a chance--possibly for the first time in their lives--to
have health insurance so they won't go broke when they get sick. To me,
when we start putting it together, it is the paycheck, the food, the
health care, and the housing.
In a country such as ours that wants to build the next middle class,
to me this is the bedrock of what we need to provide to working
families. It seems we have fallen far away from that goal of trying to
provide for working families. It has become too partisan.
I was on a talk show with the Senator from Ohio who shares the State
with Senator Brown, and he gave the classic argument against raising
the minimum wage: It is a job killer. He said: If we raise the wage 50
cents, $1 an hour, whatever it is, there will be fewer jobs.
It turns out that history and the economic analyses prove him wrong.
That is the argument that has been made against increasing the minimum
wage since Franklin Roosevelt first increased it back in the 1930s.
I ask the Senator from Ohio, when we take a look at the vulnerability
of working families in America and those who have lost their jobs
trying to find another, the basics that we are talking about give them
a fighting chance to survive, to help raise their families, and maybe
to send their kids to school for a better education and for a better
future. Failing to do that does just the opposite.
Last week fast food workers across the country led a 1-day strike to
bring attention to low-wage workers who can't make a living on their
current wages.In Chicago, some 200 workers took to the street in
protest.
This is only one part of a much larger discussion in recent days
about growing economic disparities in this country and the plight of
low-wage workers.In November, Pope Francis stated, ``While earnings of
a minority are growing, so too is the gap separating the majority from
the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.''
Only last week President Obama echoed these concerns in his address
focused specifically on income inequality.In a speech at the Center for
American Progress, the President noted that more than half of all
Americans at some point in their lives will experience poverty.
The week before Thanksgiving, a Walmart in Ohio was running a food
drive to help the hungry have a happy Thanksgiving.That kind of
generosity and empathy is commendable. What is noteworthy, though, is
that the food drive was specifically to support Walmart associates--
their own employees--in need.
It reminded me of an effort McDonalds launched earlier this year to
help their employees create a budget.
According to that budget, the only way to make ends meet for someone
making the minimum wage and working 40 hours a week at McDonalds would
be to work a second job.
Washington Post's Wonkblog analyzed the chart and found that a worker
making the minimum wage would have to work 75 hours a week to have the
after-tax income in the McDonalds sample budget.
But low wages are not a problem just in the fast food industry or
other historically low-wage fields; it is catching up to other
traditional jobs that used to be able to support a family.
There may be fewer better examples of this than in the banking
sector.
The banking industry last year posted $141.3 billion in profits.
The median executive pay--$552,000.
And yet a recent report found that 39 percent of bank tellers in New
York are enrolled in some form of public assistance.
Low wage work is just not enough to get by.
Working 40 hours per week at $7.25 per hour translates to $15,080 per
year.
That's about $400 less than the Federal poverty level guidelines for
a family of two.
If we accept the McDonald's sample budget, a worker making the
minimum wage would have to work 75 hours a week to have the after-tax
income necessary to make ends meet. Working 75 hours a week at minimum
wage--with no vacation days and limited benefits, if any--one can make
$24,720 a year, after tax.
I want to say that it is not possible, but the reality is that many
people do it. Yet how do people raise a family working that many hours?
One way people get by is they are forced to turn to government
assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,
SNAP, Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance, LIHEAP, the Children's
Health Insurance Program, CHIP, the Emergency Food Assistance program,
TEFAP, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, TANF, Section 8 housing
assistance, and, yes, the Affordable Care Act.
According to a recent UC Berkeley study, undertaken in partnership
with the University of Illinois, 52 percent of families of fast-food
workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs.
Subsidizing low wage employment through these programs costs the
Federal Government $3.9 billion annually.
Instead of trying to find solutions to ensure full time work is
adequate to support a family, many of my colleagues are attacking the
very public assistance programs that allow working families at minimum
wage jobs to get by.
For many of these working families, SNAP is the first place to turn.
At a time when almost 15 percent of households have trouble keeping
food on the table, SNAP has helped 47 million Americans buy
groceries.In Illinois, more than 2 million people--that is in one in
seven residents--rely on SNAP benefits to buy the food they need.
In my lifetime, Walmart transitioned to also selling food. Walmart
now accounts for nearly 30 percent of all groceries sold in the United
States.Yet after working at a grocery store all day, imagine having to
turn to your SNAP benefits to be able to take your own groceries home
with you or after working at the grocery store all day, a person must
turn to their local food bank.
This is the reality for working people. I wish to stress--working
people.
The House Republican solution for this is in its farm bill, where it
cut $40 billion from SNAP. The House bill gets its ``savings'' by
kicking 3.8 million people out of the program. That includes children,
single mothers, unemployed veterans, and Americans who get temporary
help from SNAP to make ends meet while they look for work.
This is unacceptable. If a farm bill conference agreement were to
reach the floor including the House language, I would vote against it
without a second thought.
But it doesn't stop with SNAP.
One of biggest challenges for low-income workers is that they are
living paycheck-to-paycheck, making sacrifices simply to keep the heat
on--with no savings for emergencies, and most low-income workers have
no healthcare coverage.With no savings
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and no health care. When someone in the family is too sick to ignore
it, the emergency room is the only real option.
With the Affordable Care Act, many of these workers and their
families can now afford health care, either through the expansion of
Medicaid or, in the very near future through a private plan in the
exchanges, using Federal subsidies.According to the CBO, 12 million
people in America are newly eligible for Medicaid. Another 23 million
people will be able to buy private health insurance.
How are Republican proposing to help these working families? They
want to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Go back to no coverage. Apparently, these families don't work hard
enough to deserve it.
We have to protect these programs, but we need to do more than that.
More and more working families are being forced to rely on government
assistance programs because their work does not support a living wage.
If working should be a requirement for receiving public assistance, I
would take it a step further and propose that if someone is working
full time, they shouldn't need public assistance.
Since 1967, the Federal minimum wage has increased from $1.40 to
$7.25.While at first glance this seems like significant progress, when
adjusted to current dollars the value of the minimum wage has actually
declined by 12.1 percent.
Had the minimum wage kept pace with inflation, it would be $10.74 an
hour today.If the minimum wage were increased to $10.10, more than 30
million workers would receive a raise, and 88 percent of those workers
are adults.
If the minimum wage were $10.10, a full-time worker being paid
minimum wage would go from making $15,080 a year to $21,000.That can be
the difference between getting by and living in poverty.
Workers in America, full-time workers, are falling behind.
Attacking or cutting programs that working poor or needy rely on will
not solve the problem. It only ignores it.
In the coming weeks I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting
policies that provide all Americans with the opportunity to improve
their lives. Full-time, low-wage workers should not have to live in
poverty.
I would ask the Senator from Ohio if he would include in this the
Affordable Care Act.
Mr. BROWN. That is right. First, the points that the assistant
majority leader was making about the bipartisanship has been exactly
right. What is most--not discouraging but perhaps the most
disappointing part of this is even as recently as 2007, when President
Bush signed this bill--it was my first month or two in the Senate when
we passed it. It was a big bipartisan vote in the House. I don't
remember exactly the numbers in the Senate. Many Republicans joined. I
believe almost every Democrat or maybe every Democrat--but it was
gladly signed by the Republican President of the United States.
From the time of the minimum wage, when Senator Hugo Black sat at
this desk and helped to write the minimum wage law and President
Roosevelt signed the bill, for all of these decades the minimum wage in
fits and starts has kept up with inflation--most of the time--until the
1980s. It has been signed on by people from both parties; the same with
the extension of unemployment benefits that we discussed, this
extension of unemployment benefits, social insurance. They pay in when
they don't need it. When they need it, they can take money out of the
social insurance fund and receive unemployment benefits if they can't
find a job.
These are very tough times. Some of my colleagues, I don't think,
understand sometimes how tough a time it is for so many families.
The President of the United States, the last President from Illinois
before this one, Abraham Lincoln, used to talk about getting out of the
White House and going out and getting his public opinion bath that he
needed to hear from the public.
I know Senator Durbin does that throughout his State of Illinois. I
know Senator Murphy of Connecticut, the Presiding Officer, does the
same.
We go out and listen to people. We are talking to somebody making $8
or $9 an hour, and this minimum increase will increase their pay. They
probably don't have insurance because they can't afford it. They are
probably eligible for the SNAP program because of their low income, and
so it is the least we can do.
These are people who work as hard as we do. We have jobs we get a lot
out of. We are well paid, we have good benefits, and we also have
wonderful opportunities to serve the public. So many people in these
jobs are barely making it. They work jobs where they are on their feet
all day. The woman in the diner is making $3 or $4 an hour and hoping
people will tip her to get her up to $7 or $8 or $9 an hour. She is
working every bit as hard as my colleagues and I work. Yet she has so
little to show for it.
This is an opportunity for us, as people who care about this country
and care about the people who live in this country--people who are
doing such hard work cleaning hotel rooms, cleaning our schools, making
sure our schools are clean and the trash is taken out, people who are
serving our food--for the people in these kinds of jobs--home care
workers who are barely making it--the least we can do is make sure the
minimum wage gets them somewhat close to a decent lifestyle and
standard of living and that we do better, if they are laid off, with
unemployment insurance and that they get a chance with the Affordable
Care Act so they can buy affordable health insurance because they will
get some help and they can draw on food stamps if they are eligible, if
they need them on these low wages.
There is no reason we can't, in the Christmas spirit, if you will, do
what has been done on a bipartisan basis during my lifetime and that of
my colleague Senator Durbin, where both parties would step up and do
it.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, if my colleague will yield, through the
Chair, for one last point, he raised something that brought to my mind
a recent story I read about the new Pope, Pope Francis. What an
extraordinary man, this Catholic. I am amazed at this man, his humility
and his popularity with Catholics and non-Catholics alike, those of
different faiths and those of no faith. They say that of an evening he
will take off his papal garb and put a simple suit on and go out into
the streets of Rome with a friend and meet with poor people and talk to
them. I can't even envision in my mind what that must be like, but it
sure tells me a lot about him, and I think it is a reminder to all of
us of two things: When he gives a message to the world about income
inequality, it is not a political message to the United States or one
country; it is a more basic message about the values in life whatever
your religious beliefs or whether you have a religious belief.
When he takes off the papal garb and goes out as an ordinary person,
I hope it is a reminder to all of us that we need to keep in touch with
the very people we represent, some of whom are not wealthy enough to
have a lobbyist or to be politically articulate during a campaign but
deserve our representation just as much.
Mr. BROWN. I thank my colleague.
Pope Francis I, as he integrated these kinds of things into his life,
he exhorted his parish priests--similar to Lincoln saying ``I need my
public opinion bath''--to smell like the flock and to get among people
and talk to them and learn from them, to smell like the flock, to be
one of them. I am not Catholic. I know my friend from Illinois is Roman
Catholic. But this Pope has really brought us to a different level. He
has called upon our better angels, if you will.
Before yielding to Senator Durbin for his remarks, I have one more
point to make about the minimum wage. The belief among many is that the
minimum wage is for a bunch of teenagers. That is simply not true. Most
minimum wage earners in this country are not teenagers; most of them
are supporting themselves and in many cases supporting a spouse or a
family or someone in their family who is disabled or a close friend.
This is a wage people really depend on to get along. It is not just
spending money for a high school kid; families depend on this.
That is why it is so important that in the next few weeks we raise
the minimum wage; tie this subminimum wage, tipped wage, to that
increase and
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index it for inflation so we don't have to do this every 3 or 4 years
just to keep up with inflation.
I yield the floor.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The assistant majority leader.
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