[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 18288-18291]
[From the U.S. 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be rescinded.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 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.

[[Page 18289]]

  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 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.

[[Page 18290]]

  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 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.

[[Page 18291]]

  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 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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