Minimum Wage Showdown in the House

by Mike Hall, Jun 14, 2006

There’s a showdown brewing in the House of Representatives over raising the minimum wage.

With Republican congressional leaders throwing up one roadblock after another to raising the minimum wage—stalled since 1997 at $5.15 an hour—Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) took the unusual step of offering a wage hike as part of an appropriations bill yesterday.

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) promised that when the bill comes to the floor next week:

We’re going to have a showdown on the minimum wage.

Hoyer’s amendment to the fiscal year 2007 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour in three steps over three years starting Jan. 1, 2007.

The amendment was approved by the House Appropriations Committee on a 32–27 vote, with seven Republicans joining all the committee’s Democrats. The seven Republicans are Jo Ann Emerson (Mo.), Ray LaHood (Ill.), Don Sherwood (Pa.),  Mike Simpson (Idaho), John Sweeney (N.Y.), James Walsh (N.Y.) and Bill Young (Fla.).

The move was unusual because House rules strictly control how amendments can be attached to spending bills. In this case, because the minimum wage increase did not come from the House committee with jurisdiction over wage issues—the Education and the Workforce Committee—it can be stripped from the bill if just one House member objects.

And in fact, one House member does not want to see low-wage workers get an increase in the minimum wage. Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), chairman of the Workforce Committee, told the Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (subscription required):

I don’t think that’s something we want to go through with…. We have a philosophical difference with raising it.

McKeon has refused to move a bill (H.R. 2429) from Miller out of the Workforce Committee that would raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour wage by 2009.

McKeon was one of 249 House members who voted yesterday to give themselves  a $3,330 cost-of-living raise, bringing their salaries to $168,500 a year. The 249-167 vote blocked a procedural attempt to stop the automatic pay raise. A full-time minimum wage employee who works 52 weeks a year—with no long holiday or summer recesses—earns $10,712 a year, the same annual salary since 1997.

Hoyer said Democrats will “pursue any avenue that we think we can to raise” the minimum wage.

Backers of an incease are trying to force the bill out of McKeon’s grasp through a discharge petition to bring it to the House floor. The petition needs the signatures of 218 House members to force a vote.

Click here to urge your U.S. representative to sign the discharge petition.

On the Senate side, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) says he may offer his minimum wage bill (S. 1062) as an amendment to pending legislation. Become a citizen co-sponsor of the Kennedy bill by clicking here.

With congressional Republican leaders and the Bush administration refusing to consider any meaningful minimum wage increase, the battle to raise the pay of millions of low-wage workers is being waged and won on the state level in the AFL-CIO’s America Needs a raise campaign.

Take a look at the latest in California and Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and North Carolina, and Missouri and see how Florida’s new higher minimum wage has been a win-win for workers and the economy.

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