[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 5]
[Senate]
[Pages 6249-6250]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          LEGISLATIVE SESSION

                                 ______
                                 

        MINIMUM WAGE FAIRNESS ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, the Senate will 
resume legislative session.
  The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business for up to 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I rise to discuss partly the state of our 
economy but more precisely the state of our workers. Working Americans 
are in some sense being attacked from both ends. We have seen an 
orchestrated attempt to cut safety net programs where a low-income 
worker making $9, $10, or $11 an hour might be eligible in some cases 
for SNAP or is surely eligible for the earned income tax credit.
  Opponents strongly say that programs such as SNAP foster a culture of 
dependency and do not reward work. Those same elected officials--some 
of whom, I might add, have voted to raise their own pay--oppose efforts 
to ensure that hard work is reworded with fair pay. Last fall one House 
Republican said: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.
  I am all for quoting Scripture. I do not think it should be used to 
vilify hard-working people. Detractors of SNAP, opponents of the 
minimum wage, cannot have it both ways. By raising the minimum wage, it 
means, frankly, fewer people will be eligible for SNAP, because if 
their wages are higher, they cannot and should not be eligible for 
certain benefits. So we create opportunities for Americans to earn a 
living wage and no longer need those benefits.
  One hundred years ago in January, Henry Ford, in 1914, announced that 
he was going to pay his workers $5 a day. Nobody thought, when they 
looked at Henry Ford and his life, nobody thought he was doing it out 
of the kindness of his heart. But that did not matter; he decided to 
pay everybody in his plant $5 a day because he understood that paying 
them more would mean a more prosperous workforce who could then, 
presto, have the money in their pocket to begin to buy a car, to buy a 
Model T or to buy one of Henry Ford's cars.
  We should be taking a page from Ford's playbook. Productivity has 
increased 85 percent in this country since 1979. It used to be as 
productivity went up, wages went up. Since World War II, between 1945 
and 1973, productivity went like this: Wages pretty much paralleled the 
increase. In other words, workers who were producing more for their 
boss would get part of the wealth, would share in the wealth they were 
helping to create for their company, for their boss.
  So while productivity has increased 85 percent in the last 35 years, 
inflation-adjusted wages increased 6 percent, and the value of the 
minimum wage fell 21 percent. Think about that. Productivity went up 85 
percent. Profits went up significantly. Wages went up only 6 percent. 
The value of the minimum wage fell 21 percent. The value of the minimum 
wage, since 1968, is actually one-third less today--the minimum wage 
today is worth one-third less in buying power of the minimum wage in 
1968.
  Simply put, workers, while they are earning more for their bosses, 
they are making their companies more profitable, workers are not seeing 
the wealth they helped to create. Fundamentally, the contract--not 
literally a legal contract but the contract we once had in this country 
was, if you work hard, if you take responsibility, if you are 
productive, if you do things according to sort of society's mores, you 
would benefit. You would benefit in higher wages. You would benefit in 
a higher standard of living.
  In the aftermath of the recession, the job growth, the increase in 
jobs, has been in the low-wage job sectors. Men and women who lost 
good-paying middle-class jobs, generally through no fault of their own, 
are returning to work at low-wage jobs, jobs that make it difficult to 
support a family.
  Enrollment for programs such as SNAP has grown. I hear some of my 
sort of tea party colleagues complain that more and more people are 
getting SNAP. They are, because wages are not going up, because the 
minimum wage has less buying power than it used to. So many workers 
that were union, middle-class workers now are making lower wages 45 
million people. So, yes, the number of people who are receiving SNAP 
benefits, food stamps has gone up.
  In 2011, 45 million people relied on those benefits. SNAP spending 
increased, but that is a reason to pass the minimum wage. Increase 
their wages and fewer people will need that. Too many people who work 
harder than ever are barely getting by despite their best efforts. That 
is why millions of fast-food workers in cities across the country took 
to the streets in December for a National Day of Action, asking for and 
demanding an increase in the minimum wage.
  More than half of frontline fast-food workers, more than half of 
those who work more than 40 hours per week, earn so little that they 
are forced to enroll their family in public assistance. Think of all 
the companies, all the companies where workers are making such low 
wages and they are getting food stamps.
  So I come to the floor to talk about the minimum wage and to 
specifically discuss support for the Fair Minimum Wage Act. Majority 
Leader Reid has been supportive of this measure, as have most of my 
colleagues in this Chamber. We have not yet been able to corral 60 
votes, which is what we need to break a filibuster, from those who I 
think are far out of step with the country, with their constituents, 
who oppose the minimum wage.
  The Fair Minimum Wage Act would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an 
hour in three 95-cent increments. In other words, it is $7.25 now. Upon 
the President's signature, it would be $8.20. One year later it would 
be $9.15. Then one year later it would be $10.10 an hour. The bill 
also--this is important to note because it is rarely talked about. The 
bill also raises the Federal minimum wage for tipped workers from the 
current $2.13 an hour to 70 percent of the regular minimum wage. If you 
work in a restaurant, if you are a server, if you push a wheelchair at 
an airport, if you are a valet, if you are working in a hotel where you 
get tips, in most cases those employers are only required to pay the 
subminimum wage, assuming that you are going to get up to the minimum 
wage with tips.
  It does not always happen that way. It is a Federal law that it 
should, but it does not always happen that way. As

[[Page 6250]]

Senator Durbin and I were talking earlier, it is not so easy to enforce 
that. So if you are in a diner and you are talking to your server, the 
chances are that your server is making significantly less than the 
minimum wage, maybe higher than $2.13--that is the law--but maybe no 
more than $3 or $4 an hour.
  If you are in an airport and you see someone pushing an older person 
in a wheelchair, usually down the concourse, or someone who is disabled 
for whatever reason, they are only making $3, $4 or $5 an hour.
  The tipped minimum wage, $2.13, has not been raised since 1991. So 
every time we have raised the minimum wage--we did it bipartisanly; 
President Bush signed it in 2007. We did one a few years before that--I 
was in the House then--bipartisanly. The Presiding Officer from Indiana 
supported these minimum wage increases. But every time we have raised 
the minimum wage since 1991, the $2.13 subminimum wage, the tipped 
wage, has been stuck. It has never been raised. This will raise the 
tipped wage.
  Let me share a couple of letters. I got a letter from Tom in Cuyahoga 
County, the county I live in, in Northeast Ohio:

       Senator Brown, I'm a 50 year old food service worker with a 
     college degree, and I make $7.40 an hour. I just closed my 
     retirement account that had $2,500 in it to pay my bills--and 
     it's still not enough to cover everything. Now with that 
     money gone, I should be able to qualify for food stamps. I 
     only have the most basic bills, and I don't have any credit 
     card debt or loans. How much longer do we have to wait for a 
     livable wage?

  The people whom I have met who are working minimum wage or close to 
minimum wage, $8-, $9-, $10-an-hour jobs, are people who often hold two 
jobs. They are working hard. They have so little to show for it. For 
somebody who is willing to work as most people in this country do, they 
should have a livable wage.
  We know there are many more stories such as Tom's that all of us will 
hear if we go out in our States and listen. Pope Francis I exhorted his 
parish priests to go out and ``smell like the flock.'' The illusion of 
the Old and New Testaments and sheep and shepherds was obviously what 
he was referring to, but he was also referring to the fact of how 
important it is for people in his church, in the Roman Catholic Church, 
the priests, the people who minister to people, should understand how 
people live.
  It is an important admonition for politicians too. I think more of my 
colleagues should get out of Washington and ``smell like the flock'' as 
Pope Francis said, meet people trying to make a go of it on a minimum 
wage, put food on their table to support their families, to put a 
little aside maybe for retirement someday; all of those are so 
important.
  When we are seeing people working harder and harder, and, frankly, 
getting paid less and less money for it because of the decline of the 
buying power of the minimum wage, we know it is time for change.
  I ask my colleagues to support the Fair Minimum Wage Act. It will 
pull millions of people out of poverty. It will help our economy 
because it will put money in people's pockets that they will 
immediately spend, generating other economic activity and creating 
jobs.
  I yield the floor.

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