[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 14111-14115]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

                                 ______
                                 

                              MINIMUM WAGE

 Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, I ask that the following article 
from the Wall Street Journal, dated July 19, 2001, be printed in the 
Record.

             [From the Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2001]

                           [By Rick Wartzman]

   Falling Behind--As Officials Lost Faith in the Minimum Wage, Pat 
                           Williams Lived it

       Shreveport, LA.--Night had fallen by the time Pat Williams, 
     hungry and bone tired, arrived home to find the little red 
     ticket mocking the more than 10 hours of toil she had just 
     put in.
       ``Oh, Lord,'' she said, reaching into her mailbox, ``what 
     is this?'' She swatted a mosquito, held the ticket to the 
     light above her front stoop and took in the bad news: Reliant 
     Energy Inc. had cut off her gas because her account was $477 
     overdue.
       ``I ain't going to sweat it,'' she muttered over and over. 
     Clearly, though, she was wound tight, and soon began puffing 
     on a succession of discount cigarettes.
       It was early April, and Ms. Williams was dressed in the 
     dark blue uniform that she wears at her first job, caring for 
     the aged and infirm at a nursing home. Atop that was the gray 
     apron she dons for her second job, cleaning offices at night. 
     The place where she works as a nursing assistant, Harmony 
     House, was paying her $5.55 an hour--barely above the minimum 
     wage--even though she has been there more than 10 years, is a 
     union member and completed college courses to become 
     certified. The cleaning job, which she took up because she 
     couldn't make ends meet, pays right at the federally mandated 
     minimum: $5.15 an hour.
       For the 46-year-old single mother with a bright smile and 
     big dimples, life has never been easy. But, as she will tell 
     you, it certainly has been easier.
       When she began minimum-wage work more than two decades ago, 
     Ms. Williams says, she had little difficulty paying her 
     bills. Small indulgences for her and her three children--a 
     burger and fries on a Saturday afternoon, a new blouse, the 
     occasional name-brand sneakers--weren't such a stretch. Most 
     of all, Ms. Williams wasn't nearly so stressed over money.
       Sometimes, she and her best friend, Ruby Moore, sit in Ms. 
     Williams's back yard and, as trains thunder by, they talk 
     about how they just can't get ahead. Ms. Moore, 51, has 
     earned around the minimum wage for years, first by working in 
     the kitchen of a drug-treatment center, and now by cooking 
     for recovering addicts of a different sort--the gamblers 
     who've surfaced along with the glittering casino boats on the 
     Red River. ``It's much harder than it used to be,'' she says. 
     ``You've got to skip this bill in order to pay that bill.''
       ``You think you're moving forward,'' adds Ms. Williams, 
     ``but you're just moving backwards.''
       There's little wonder why. As a long-time low-wage worker, 
     Ms. Williams has felt the sting of one of the most profound 
     shifts in American economic policy during the past 20 years: 
     a mounting disdain for the minimum wage. Established during 
     the New Deal, the minimum wage was once viewed by Democrats 
     and Republicans alike as an instrument of economic justice--
     an effort to ``end starvation wages,'' as President Franklin 
     D. Roosevelt himself put it. Now, though, it is seen by much 
     of official Washington as an economic impediment, an undue 
     burden on a marketplace better left unfettered. Where the 
     onus was once on the business owner to pay ``a decent wage,'' 
     it's now more on the worker to demonstrate that he or she 
     deserves one.
       This sea change began when Ronald Reagan swept into office. 
     From 1950 through 1982, the minimum wage was allowed to fall 
     below 45% of the average hourly wage in the U.S. in only four 
     separate years. Since 1982, the minimum wage has never 
     reached 45%, and it currently stands at 36%, of that 
     benchmark. Even using a conservative measure of inflation, 
     the minimum wage throughout the '60s and '70s was 
     consistently worth more than $5.50 an hour--and frequently 
     more than $6--in today's terms. After 1980, its value 
     plummeted, sinking to less than $4.50 as President Reagan 
     left office. Two subsequent increases have nudged it back up 
     to its present $5.15.
       While the robust job market of the '90s thinned the ranks 
     of minimum-wage workers--only about 1% of hourly employees 
     earn exactly $5.15 an hour now, down from more

[[Page 14112]]

     than 9% in 1980--plenty of people still hover right around 
     the pay floor.
       Legislation introduced in Congress last February would 
     elevate the minimum wage to $6.65 an hour by 2003. More than 
     11 million workers, or about 15% of the hourly labor force, 
     now earn from $5.15 to $6.64. President Bush has signaled 
     that he could accept a moderate increase in the minimum 
     wage--but only if states are allowed to opt out. The Senate, 
     where the Democrats recently gained control, is expected to 
     take up the matter in the coming weeks.
       Meanwhile, in communities across the country, low-wage work 
     isn't a relic, but an unremitting reality. A just-published 
     study by two economists--William Carrington, formerly of the 
     Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve's Bruce 
     Fallick--gives a name to this phenomenon: the ``minimum-wage 
     career.'' They tracked some 3,500 people for 10 years after 
     they had left school and found that more than 8% spent at 
     least half of that time in jobs paying at or near the minimum 
     wage. In Ms. Williams's case, practically everyone she knows 
     has been mired in such occupations their whole working lives.
       For them, it's as if the two longest peacetime economic 
     expansions in the nation's history--one under President 
     Reagan, the other under President Clinton--never happened at 
     all.
       Ms. Williams earned $10,067 in wages last year. She also 
     received a $2,353 federal tax credit targeted to the working 
     poor. Because her children are all grown and gone, the size 
     of the credit hinges on Ms. Williams's seven-year-old 
     grandson, Kimdrick, staying with her for more than half the 
     year. Caring for Kimdrick is a survival strategy she worked 
     out with her eldest daughter; if she weren't caring for a 
     child, Ms. Williams would have been eligible for a tax credit 
     of only $27--a point at which, she says, she'd likely be on 
     the streets. The daughter claims her other two children for 
     tax purposes.
       Through the 1980s, Ms. Williams's wages were so low that 
     she received welfare payments--at times as much as $217 a 
     month--to supplement her income. But she ceased collecting 
     these handouts 12 years ago, partly, she says, because it was 
     a hassle to reapply every few months and partly because of 
     the indignity. ``I just wanted welfare to be a stepping 
     stone,'' she says. ``It made me feel terrible.'' Last summer, 
     Ms. Williams also stopped reapplying for food stamps, which 
     in the past had been worth up to $324 a month, depending on 
     how many of her children were living with her and other 
     factors. The local housing authority still picks up nearly 
     two-thirds of her monthly $525 in rent, and she receives free 
     medical care for her high blood pressure at an indigent 
     clinic.
       Inside her small but fastidiously kept house--decorated 
     mostly with bric-a-brac from Good Will and the Dollar Store 
     and pictures cut out of magazines hung on the walls--Ms. 
     Williams ticked off the expenses that she was juggling at the 
     moment. Besides the gas bill, a notice recently arrived 
     reminding her that she was late in paying $142.14 to the 
     electric company. She owed $55.26 to the phone company, 
     $23.47 on the student loan she took out years ago for her 
     nursing classes, and $39.95 for her burglar alarm--a must, 
     she says, in her crime-infested neighborhood.
       Violence touched her just last year. Ms. Williams's 
     boyfriend snapped and, according to police records, came at 
     two of her kids with a knife. Ms. Williams shot him with her 
     .25-caliber pistol. He staggered into traffic and was run 
     over and died. The authorities ruled the shooting 
     ``justifiable,'' and Ms. Williams was never charged.
       The incident, she says, left a void in her heart. It also 
     left one in her pocketbook. The boyfriend used to chip in on 
     the bills, and his absence has been the main reason that Ms. 
     Williams has had to find a second job--even in Shreveport, 
     where it's relatively cheap to live.
       Her budget offers no cushion. The bill from Reliant Energy, 
     swollen in part by unusually cold weather last winter, sent 
     Ms. Williams tearing into her scant savings. She had somehow 
     managed to put away a few dollars in the hopes of eventually 
     moving someplace quieter, out in the country. But in a single 
     stroke, the check to Reliant wiped out most of her nest egg. 
     ``It's devastating,'' she said, ``just devastating.''
       A little later, Ms. Williams moved along Hollywood Avenue, 
     a run-down commercial strip near her house, where sin and 
     salvation compete head-on; for every liquor store and bail 
     bondsman, a Baptist church beckons. ``Why is it so hard to 
     get a pay increase?'' she asked. ``If I made $7 an hour, I'd 
     think I was doing good.''
       Over on Illinois Avenue, Ms. Williams gazed at the simple 
     wooden house she grew up in. She remembered sitting out on 
     the front porch with her daddy, watching him sell 
     watermelons--three for $1--in the 1950s. ``They were good and 
     sweet,'' she said. It was a different world back then.
       One by one, President Eisenhower's top advisers paraded 
     into the Cabinet Room of the White House and took their 
     places around the big mahogany table. The discussion on this 
     morning, Dec. 10, 1954, quickly turned to the workaday 
     business of running the country: an initiative to add 70,000 
     units of public housing, the Buy American Act, the need for 
     preventive medical care. Yet one subject, above all, seemed 
     to stir the participants' passion: raising the minimum wage.
       Mr. Eisenhower--the first Republican to occupy the White 
     House since the minimum wage was enacted--had floated the 
     idea of increasing it from 75 cents an hour early in the 
     year. Now, with the economy humming along, it appeared the 
     perfect time to put the plan in motion. Even the president's 
     economic adviser, the cautious Arthur Burns, agreed that the 
     only question left to decide was what ``the optimum figure'' 
     for the new wage would be.
       Handwritten notes from the cabinet meeting, stored at the 
     Eisenhower Library, suggest that the president listened 
     intently to the numbers being bandied about. George Humphrey, 
     the treasury secretary, declared that going to $1 an hour 
     ``would be too much'' and could undermine smooth relations 
     with the business community. All eyes then fell on Labor 
     Secretary Jim Mitchell, a plain-spoken man who had once been 
     in charge of employee relations at Bloomingdale's. One 
     dollar, he countered, ``has great appeal.'' The vice 
     president, Richard Nixon, added that it would be 
     ``unfortunate'' if the administration recommended less than 
     $1 because that would only enhance the odds that Democrats in 
     Congress would ``raise the ante.''
       Finally, Mr. Eisenhower spoke up. ``We just have to seek 
     that place where both sides will curse us,'' he said. ``Then 
     we'll be right.''
       The law establishing the federal minimum wage, the Fair 
     Labor Standards Act of 1938, had called for just such a 
     balancing act. It stipulated that workers be paid at least 
     enough to maintain a ``minimum standard of living necessary 
     for health, efficiency and general well-being.'' At the same 
     time, though, it sought to do this ``without substantially 
     curtailing employment.''
       Mr. Eisenhower ultimately proposed an increase to 90 
     cents--and the cursing came on cue. The U.S. Chamber of 
     Commerce warned that a 90-cent minimum would be ``self-
     defeating'' because many mom-and-pop businesses would have to 
     shut their doors and lay people off, hurting the very low-
     skilled workers who were supposed to benefit. George Meany, 
     the president of the American Federation of Labor, denounced 
     the administration's plan as ``grossly inadequate'' to lift 
     up the poor and pushed for $1.25 an hour.
       In many ways, the economic debate hasn't changed much over 
     the years. Opponents have long claimed that imposing a higher 
     minimum wage kills jobs. ``The direct unemployment,'' wrote 
     Prof. George Stigler in a landmark article in the June 1946 
     American Economic Review, ``is substantial and certain.''
       Just yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan 
     told a congressional hearing that he would abolish the 
     minimum wage if he could. ``I'm not in favor of cutting 
     anybody's earnings or preventing them from rising,'' he said, 
     ``but I am against them losing their jobs because of 
     artificial government intervention, which is essentially what 
     the minimum wage is.''
       Yet other analysts have disagreed, touting the minimum wage 
     as an effective means for helping working people to escape 
     poverty. Those in this camp contend that as long as it isn't 
     excessive, an increase in the minimum wage will destroy few, 
     if any, jobs. Their rationale: As businesses raise their 
     wages, they're apt to suffer less turnover and will often 
     find that their employees are more diligent, leading to a 
     jump in output that more than makes up for the extra cost to 
     the payroll.
       As the Eisenhower plan moved to Capitol Hill, the action 
     unfolded in a manner typical of the era. Democrats, by and 
     large, wanted a higher minimum wage than did their GOP 
     counterparts. But the divide wasn't purely partisan. Southern 
     Democrats railed against a raise, while ``liberal 
     Republicans'' favored one.
       In July 1955, a bill emerged from Congress to increase the 
     minimum wage to $1. A couple of weeks later, Mr. Eisenhower 
     signed the legislation into law. ``I think `fairness' is a 
     good word'' to express what the president hoped to achieve, 
     says Maxwell Rabb, who was Mr. Eisenhower's cabinet 
     secretary. ``He did not want a divided nation,'' and lifting 
     wages for those at the bottom was part of that larger agenda.
       The minimum wage went up again during each of the next two 
     administrations--those of presidents Kennedy and Johnson--and 
     coverage also was extended to more than 12 million workers, 
     including retail and restaurant employees and farm hands, who 
     previously had been exempt. By 1968, as Richard Nixon was 
     elected president, the value of the minimum wage had hit its 
     apex: $6.82 an hour in today's terms.
       Many lawmakers fixed their sights on the average wage in 
     the U.S., taking care to keep the minimum at about half that 
     amount. ``People feel poor when their income is less than 50% 
     of the average,'' explained Rep. Al Quie of Minnesota, who 
     served for 11 terms beginning in 1958 and would go on to 
     become ranking Republican on the House Labor Committee.
       Mr. Quie and other key players from the minimum-wage wars 
     of yesteryear--including members of both parties--say their 
     advocacy for increases was propelled, in large

[[Page 14113]]

     part, by a fundamental belief: People who get up and go to 
     work each day deserve to make enough money to cover their 
     essential needs. Employers that aren't productive enough to 
     provide such a basic level of compensation--``chiselers,'' 
     some detractors have called them--don't belong in an affluent 
     society.
       This way of thinking, recalls Eugene Mittelman, who served 
     as labor counsel for GOP Sen. Jacob Javits of New York from 
     the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, transcended all the 
     conflicting studies about how the minimum wage affected 
     unemployment, inflation and poverty. ``It was more of a 
     general feeling that if people worked, they ought to make a 
     living wage,'' he says. ``This wasn't economically driven. It 
     was morally driven.''
       The Shreveport that Pat Williams was born into in the 
     spring of 1955 was an oil-and-gas boomtown, where folks 
     swayed to the music of Elvis Presley, the young star of the 
     ``Louisiana Hayride,'' a radio show aired right from the 
     city's own Municipal Auditorium.
       The Williams household didn't partake in the good times, 
     however. The family never had much money, and Pat was raised 
     under the loving but strict hand of a Jehovah's Witness. She 
     was, she says, ``a good kid'' until, at age 13, she made a 
     startling discovery: The couple she thought were her 
     parents--the domestic and retired carpenter she had known her 
     whole life as ``Mommy and Daddy''--were actually her aunt and 
     uncle. Pat's real mother had abandoned her as a baby.
       The revelation ``totally messed me up,'' she says. ``I went 
     from getting A's and B's in school to D's and F's, when I 
     showed up at all.''
       By 19, Ms. Williams was a 10th-grade dropout with three 
     children, no husband and no job. Then, one day in 1979, she 
     says, ``something inside me clicked.'' Bored with just 
     lounging around, living off welfare, and overwhelmed by a 
     sense that ``I wanted my children to have more than I did,'' 
     Ms. Williams set out to find work.
       She landed a job at the Hollywood Tourist Courts, a rooms-
     by-the-hour motel where she cleaned up and checked in 
     patrons, some of them acquaintances of hers apparently 
     sneaking off for illicit trysts. She received only minimum 
     wage--then $2.90 an hour--but ``it felt good,'' she says, to 
     be bringing in her own money. ``I was proud.''
       What's more, Ms. Williams found that even on her salary--
     which was equivalent to $6.34 an hour in today's dollars--she 
     was able to meet her routine expenses without much of a 
     strain. She usually had enough money left on the weekends to 
     take her brood to Mister Swiss, a hamburger joint next to the 
     motel, where they'd grab lunch and pop the leftover change 
     into the jukebox. Despite being poor, says Ms. Williams, 
     ``those days were more carefree.''
       Over the next two years, the minimum wage rose to $3.35 an 
     hour, or $6.08 in today's terms, following a four-step 
     increase that had been passed in 1977. Little did Ms. 
     Williams know that this would mark the last time the minimum 
     wage would be raised for nearly a decade, undoing a practice 
     that had been carried out by seven U.S. presidents--and 
     leaving her further and further behind.
       In the summer of 1969, an analysis written by a former 
     commissioner of labor statistics named Ewan Clague crossed 
     President Nixon's desk. It indicated that the minimum wage 
     was exacerbating one of the most vexing problems confronting 
     the nation at the time: a skyrocketing youth unemployment 
     rate. A business owner subject to the minimum wage, Mr. 
     Clague wrote, ``cannot afford to put up with a mediocre job 
     performance by inexperienced youngsters.''
       Mr. Nixon's answer--a proposal whose development can be 
     traced through numerous documents culled from the National 
     Archives--was to allow employers to pay 16- and 17-year-olds 
     a ``youth subminimum,'' an amount even lower than the minimum 
     wage. The logic was simple: High-school dropouts could then 
     find entry-level positions much more easily, acquiring the 
     skills and work habits they'd need to eventually secure more-
     rewarding jobs. Yet the plan faced many critics, who feared 
     that business owners would engage in, as Sen. Javits put it, 
     the ``wholesale replacement'' of adult workers with younger, 
     cheaper employees.
       A bill to raise the minimum wage finally passed the 
     Democratic-controlled Congress in August 1973. However, it 
     didn't include a youth subminimum, and it sought to ramp up 
     the wage on a faster timetable than many Republicans thought 
     prudent. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union 
     launched a campaign urging Mr. Nixon to sign the bill; the 
     corset and brassiere assemblers from Local 32 in New York 
     alone mailed him more than 1,500 postcards and letters. 
     Unimpressed, Mr. Nixon vetoed the legislation.
       Mr. Meany, the AFL-CIO chief, slammed the president's 
     decision as a ``cruel blow'' to low-wage workers, while 
     Harrison Williams of New Jersey, the Democratic chairman of 
     the Senate Labor Committee, accused Mr. Nixon of exhibiting 
     ``a callous disregard'' for the working poor. But in 
     hindsight, what's most striking about the standoff--so bitter 
     and protracted that the legislative history would one day 
     fill a bound volume more than two inches thick--is that few 
     voices ever assailed the minimum wage itself.
       ``There can be no doubt about the need for a higher minimum 
     wage,'' Mr. Nixon said in his veto message. ``Both fairness 
     and decency require that we act. . . .''



       In the spring of 1974, Congress passed a new minimum-wage 
     bill, which still lacked a youth subminimum. But this time, 
     on April 8, Mr. Nixon signed it, a deed that would get a 
     little lost on the next morning's front page given other news 
     out of Atlanta: Hank Aaron had just smashed his record-
     setting 715th major-league home run.
       Few in the president's party protested the raise, which 
     took the minimum wage to $2.30 an hour ($6.25 in 2001 terms) 
     from $1.60 over three years. That made up for much of the 
     inflation that had eaten away at it since the last increase 
     in '68. The president himself proclaimed that, while Congress 
     ``did not go as far as I wished in protecting . . . work 
     opportunities for youth,'' the fight had dragged on long 
     enough. Improving the wages of workers whose earnings have 
     ``remained static for six years,'' he said, ``is now a matter 
     of justice that can no longer be fairly delayed.''
       It wouldn't take much of a cynic to dismiss President 
     Nixon's comments as politically motivated, especially given 
     that he signed the bill as the Watergate scandal neared its 
     climax. Surely, he no longer had the muscle to sustain 
     another veto. But several Nixon advisers insist that to read 
     it this way would be mistaken.
       ``This wasn't a political sop to anybody,'' says Ken Cole, 
     then Mr. Nixon's point man on domestic-policy issues. ``He 
     believed in what he was doing.''
       Whenever Labor Department supervisor Willis Nordlund needed 
     some esoteric piece of information on the minimum wage, he 
     knew right where to turn: the big bank of file cabinets 
     inside room C-3319 at the department's cavernous Washington 
     headquarters--a depository so chockfull, he says, it 
     contained handwritten charts going back to the days of the 
     New Deal.
       And so, Mr. Nordlund recalls, it was more than a little 
     shocking when one morning, sometime in the late 1980s, he 
     walked into the third-floor file room, only to find all the 
     material thrown out by another supervisor who wanted the 
     space.
       For someone who had taken to heart Franklin Roosevelt's 
     assessment that, next to Social Security, the Fair Labor 
     Standards Act ranked as ``the most far-reaching, far-sighted 
     program for the benefit of workers ever adopted,'' it was not 
     an easy period. Mr. Nordlund's budget for research into the 
     minimum wage had been slashed through the Reagan years. Now, 
     the cleaning out of the files, he says, was ``the final kick 
     in the gut''--to him and, symbolically at least, to the 
     minimum wage itself. ``This was an administration,'' he says, 
     ``that just wanted the minimum wage to go away.''
       Indeed, it did. A mere six years after Richard Nixon had 
     talked about raising it as ``a matter of justice'' and three 
     years after Jimmy Carter had raised it again, Ronald Reagan 
     blasted the minimum wage as the cause of ``more misery and 
     unemployment than anything since the Great Depression.''
       Seen this way, raising the minimum wage wasn't moral; it 
     was downright ``immoral,'' says economist Milton Friedman, 
     the intellectual godfather of the Reagan revolution. ``If 
     you're willing to work for $1.25 an hour, and I'm willing to 
     pay you $1.25 an hour because that's what you're worth, are 
     you better off being unemployed'' because the government 
     insists on a higher wage?
       This wasn't a wholly new line of reasoning, to be sure. But 
     after President Reagan was elected, ``the tone changed,'' 
     says Sen. Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is a 
     leading champion of a higher minimum wage. ``It was much more 
     ideological.''
       For the first time ever, a president and his top aides set 
     out to see the minimum wage wither. ``If we would have had 
     our druthers,'' acknowledges Murray Weidenbaum, the chairman 
     of Mr. Reagan's first Council of Economic Advisers, ``we 
     would have eliminated it.'' However, because that would have 
     been such ``a painful political process,'' Mr. Weidenbaum 
     says that he and other officials were content to let 
     inflation turn the minimum wage into ``an effective dead 
     letter.''
       The administration's antipathy was fueled by scholarship 
     similar to that which Mr. Nixon had zeroed in on earlier: The 
     minimum wage, these studies found, was a barrier to 
     employment for low-skilled workers, especially African-
     American teens.
       Much of this research was the product of a ``neoclassical'' 
     movement in economics that had been gaining steam in academic 
     circles since the 1960s, thanks in no small part to the 
     influence of University of Chicago professors, including Mr. 
     Friedman and George Stigler. The school emphasized the 
     virtues of economic efficiency. The concept that every worker 
     is entitled to a ``living wage,'' regardless of his or her 
     skills, ``was no longer part of the discussion,'' says Robert 
     Prasch, who teaches the history of economic thought at 
     Middlebury College.
       At one point, Mr. Reagan proposed his own version of a 
     youth subminimum. But unlike President Nixon, whose promotion 
     of a lesser pay scale for teenagers had been tempered by a 
     sense that the minimum wage shouldn't be

[[Page 14114]]

     allowed to erode too much in general, Mr. Reagan saw almost 
     any meddling in the marketplace as anathema. The president 
     ``believed that the government should not have the right to 
     step in and bar employment opportunities for anyone,'' says 
     John Cogan, who served as an assistant secretary in the 
     Reagan Labor Department. ``The moral issue was very clear in 
     his mind.''
       It was for others as well. Many of the Republicans who rode 
     on Mr. Reagan's coattails in 1980 ``thought just like he 
     did'' on the minimum wage, says John Motley, who was then a 
     lobbyist for the National Federation of Independent Business, 
     a group representing small enterprise. In fact, he says, 
     about two dozen lawmakers elected to Congress that year--far 
     more than ever before--were NFIB members. On Capitol Hill, 
     entrepreneurs were treated increasingly as ``heroic 
     figures,'' Mr. Motley says. ``The government needed to help 
     them, not saddle them with mandates and regulations.''
       As the NFIB and other minimum-wage adversaries such as the 
     National Restaurant Association ascended, the policy's 
     greatest guardian fell on hard times. Following President 
     Reagan's firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981, 
     labor unions went on the defensive and were unable to fight 
     as tenaciously as they had in the past for a higher minimum 
     wage. All the while, the portion of the work force that's 
     unionized declined steadily, edging under 20% in 1984.
       When Mr. Reagan took office in 1981, the minimum wage was 
     at $3.35 an hour. When he left eight years later, it was 
     still at $3.35. In real terms, its value had sunk almost 27%, 
     to $4.46 in today's dollars.
       Back in Shreveport, Pat Williams grappled with the 
     consequences. After a couple of years at the Hollywood 
     Courts, she left the motel for a better job, cooking soul 
     food at a restaurant called the Riverboat Inn for the 
     comparatively lofty pay of $5.75 an hour. But the place shut 
     down in the mid-1980s, and Ms. Williams wound up as a nursing 
     assistant at Harmony House, back on the minimum wage.
       As her purchasing power dwindled, Ms. Williams scrimped. 
     Where her family once enjoyed a varied diet, including all 
     sorts of meat, by the late '80s they ate strictly chicken--so 
     much of it that her kids would break out in song around the 
     dinner table:

       Chicken fly high
       Chicken fly low
       Chicken fly Mamma's way
       Don't fly no mo'

       When the chicken money ran out, the children recall, they 
     subsisted on beans and rice.
       The worst, though, was the holidays. Ms. Williams and the 
     kids--Theresa, Youlonda and Darrell--all still vividly 
     remember the Christmas that they couldn't afford a single 
     gift. Youlonda says that she and her siblings tried to 
     comfort their mom, telling her it was all right, that they 
     understood. But Ms. Williams just sat on her bed and cried. 
     Eventually, she came out of her room and turned on the 
     stereo. She doesn't remember exactly what she played that 
     December afternoon, but she's sure it was her favorite music: 
     the blues.
       ``If you really listen to the blues,'' she says, ``you find 
     out it's nothing but the truth.''
       A half dozen Harmony House workers sat on Ms. Williams's 
     threadbare couches one evening last April, sipping beers and 
     peering through a cigarette haze, as union organizer Zack 
     Nauth offered up something rare in their lives: a word of 
     hope.
       Louisiana nursing homes, which had been complaining that 
     deficient Medicaid reimbursements were the main culprit for 
     their workers' low pay, were slated to receive a $60 million 
     infusion from the state. Mr. Nauth, of the Service Employees 
     International Union, told the women that they needed to speak 
     up and make sure they got their fair share. The nursing 
     homes, Mr. Nauth said, would ``just as soon put it all into 
     their own bank accounts.''
       The women were skeptical that any of it would come their 
     way, however, and spent most of the night venting. One 
     worker, Shirley Vance, was particularly testy and questioned 
     why they even have a union at Harmony House. ``I don't see no 
     results,'' she said, griping about her biweekly dues of 
     $6.50. But Ms. Williams and her friend, Annie Freeman, 
     maintained that the union has been a real plus. Workers had 
     fewer rights and virtually no benefits, they said, before the 
     SEIU got there. ``We've had to fight for what we have,'' said 
     Ms. Williams.
       Of the six women at the meeting, all were making less than 
     $6 an hour, including one who has been at Harmony House for 
     18 years. ``We can't survive on what they pay us,'' said Ms. 
     Freeman, a nursing assistant who, after more than a decade at 
     the home, earns $5.60 an hour.
       ``We sure can't,'' echoed Ms. Vance. ``It's pitiful.''
       Before the meeting broke up, the conversation turned to the 
     minimum wage. Mr. Nauth told the group that he's heard 
     rumblings that Congress may vote on an increase this year. 
     Ms. Williams said she gets ``all excited'' at the prospect 
     but knows better than to count on it. The last time lawmakers 
     deliberated on such legislation, just last year, it died.
       Since Ronald Reagan left office, the minimum wage has been 
     raised twice: with great reluctance by President Bush in 1989 
     and by President Clinton in 1996. Both followed drawn-out 
     battles defined by the kind of partisan sniping that has come 
     with the changed complexion of Congress. Many of the seats 
     once held by Southern Democrats have been seized by 
     Republicans, and the number of GOP moderates who used to 
     support the minimum wage has shriveled in the conservative 
     tide.
       One new twist, added to the debate in recent rounds, is 
     that tax breaks for small businesses are now routinely linked 
     to any minimum-wage bill. The only way low-wage workers get 
     help is if company owners do, too. In earlier years, ``that 
     would have been laughed out of the room by both sides,'' says 
     Ken Young, a long-time AFL-CIO official. No one thought about 
     business breaks ``when you were talking about the people at 
     the very bottom end of the economic ladder.''
       With the minimum wage worth less today than it was all 
     through the '60s and '70s, a backlash has developed around 
     the nation. Ten states and the District of Columbia now have 
     their own minimum wages that are higher than the federal 
     government's. And in a host of cities, so-called living-wage 
     campaigns have been undertaken to raise workers' pay to 
     anywhere from around $8.00 an hour--what it takes for someone 
     to support a family of four above the poverty line--to more 
     than $10.
       The immediate aim of the Harmony House workers, though, was 
     far more modest: a $1-an-hour increase. Mr. Nauth asked the 
     women to devise a slogan that they could use to rally the 
     public to their cause. Ms. Freeman's entry: ``Take Care of 
     the People Who Take Care of Yours.''
       Several of the women said they think from time to time 
     about finding another job. The Shreveport economy has been 
     strong lately, and most ``anybody that's got some get-up-and-
     go'' should be able to find work that pays satisfactorily, 
     says Mayor Keith Hightower. The median pay for telemarketers 
     in the area is $8.50 an hour. Housekeepers at the casinos 
     earn up to $7. But for someone like Ms. Williams, who burns 
     up so much energy just trying to make it day to day, job 
     hunting seems hugely daunting.
       Besides, she and the others say that, save for their wages, 
     they feel good about what they do. The nursing home residents 
     ``are like family,'' says Ms. Williams, who keeps photographs 
     of her patients who've passed on. In the mid-'90s, Ms. 
     Williams left Harmony House for a hospital job that paid a 
     bit better, but she came back a couple of years later because 
     she didn't like the atmosphere at the new place nearly as 
     much.
       Over at Harmony House, a low-slung edifice that's 
     antiseptic-clean inside, officials say they'd love to pay 
     their workers more, but the Medicaid situation has made it 
     impossible. ``We've really been in a pinch,'' says James 
     Shelton, a supervisor at Central Management Co., a Winnfield, 
     La.-based firm whose principals own and operate Harmony House 
     along with other nursing homes around the state. 
     Nevertheless, the company's president saw his own pay go up 
     44% in 1999. According to the latest available records from 
     the state health department, Teddy Price's salary soared to 
     $402,943 that year from $279,282 in 1998. A spokeswoman says 
     the increase reflects Mr. Price's heightened responsibilities 
     during the past few years as Central Management has added 
     five new facilities to its portfolio.
       Less than a week after The Wall Street Journal asked 
     Central Management about its workers' wages, Harmony House 
     announced that ``because of market conditions,'' it was 
     raising the pay of its certified nursing assistants. 
     Housekeepers, laundry workers and kitchen personnel got no 
     increase.
       Ms. Williams says she's ``grateful.'' She now makes $6.35 
     an hour--pay that's about equal in value to that of her first 
     minimum-wage job, 22 years ago.


                       The Faces of Low-Wage Work

       Name: Gussie Cannedy.
       Age: 76.
       Home: Philadelphia.
       Occupation: Answers phones at the American Red Cross.
       Hourly wage: $5.15.
       Ms. Cannedy, a widow who retired as a clothing-factory 
     supervisor in 1985, works at the Red Cross to supplement her 
     $715 in monthly Social Security income. Yet it isn't really 
     enough. ``If it weren't for my children sending money every 
     so often,'' she says, ``I couldn't get over the hump.''
                                  ____

       Name: Mary Anne Thomas.
       Age: 40.
       Home: North Little Rock, Ark.
       Occupation: Personal care and home-health aide.
       Hourly wage: $5.60.
       Ms. Thomas, who works about 18 hours a week, says she is 
     doing okay, thanks to her husband's $7.50-an-hour job as a 
     liquor-store salesman. Still, she has been actively 
     campaigning for a ``living wage'' in her area, after seeing 
     so many colleagues struggling to stay afloat.
                                  ____

       Name: Trae Sweeten.
       Age: 18.
       Home: Newport, Tenn.
       Occupation: Does everything from making burgers to cleaning 
     the parking lot at a Wendy's restaurant.

[[Page 14115]]

       Hourly Wage: $5.60.
       Trae, who lives with his father and will soon start 
     community college, says his wage is sufficient for ``putting 
     money in my pocket.'' Besides, he adds, his stint at Wendy's 
     has been ``a nice taste of the working world.''
                                  ____

       Name: Celia Gonzalez.
       Age: 48.
       Home: San Antonio.
       Occupation: Sews baseball caps and tennis visors at a hat 
     factory.
       Hourly Wage: $6.
       Ms. Gonzalez, a single mom, counts on her 21-year-old son, 
     who earns $5.15 an hour at a tortilla factory, to help with 
     the family finances. ``Food is now very expensive,'' says Ms. 
     Gonzalez, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico about 15 years 
     ago. She stays at home on weekends because going out anywhere 
     would burn the fuel she needs to get herself and her son to 
     work.

                          ____________________