White House Staff Got a Raise. Minimum Wage Workers Didn’t

by Mike Hall, Jul 12, 2006

It’s no secret it’s getting harder and harder to stretch that paycheck. Gas prices climbing relentlessly. Inflation pushing the prices of just about everything higher and higher. Interest rates ticking upward.

You know what America needs? America Needs a Raise.

Guess who got one? Karl Rove and every top-paid White House staffer.

Guess who didn’t? Every single minimum wage worker in America.

The same day that House Republican blocked yet another vote on raising the minimum wage, The National Journal published a list of 433 White House salaries. (Click here for the Journal’s list of White House salaries.)

Gas prices won’t worry the 19 highest paid staffers—Rove included. (Rove’s official title, by the way, is assistant to the president, deputy chief of staff & senior advisor.)
Their 2006 pay jumped by 1,400 gallons of gas, or $4,200 more than 2005. The National Journal says the cost of living increase bumped their salaries from $161,000 a year to $165,200.

One of the biggest raises went to First Lady Laura Bush’s chief of staff, Anita McBride, who received a $16,000 a year raise to $149,000 a year.

Appropriately, for an administration that repeatedly has fought any increase in the federal minimum wage—which has been frozen at $5.15 an hour since 1997—the lowest-paid workers at the White House didn’t see a penny increase in their salary. The Journal reports:

Those at the bottom of the White House staff pay scale—the folks answering phones and responding to the president’s mail, for example—remain stuck at last year’s pay floor of $30,000, according to a year-to-year comparison of White House data obtained by National Journal.

At that level, the White House aide who keeps a log of the gifts sent to the president makes about as much as the average starting pay for a public school teacher. At $15 an hour, that’s almost three times the national minimum wage of $5.15. (Congress is debating this summer whether to raise the minimum wage, while the administration prefers to leave it where it is).

That brings us to yesterday’s minimum wage action where House Democrats again tried to force Republican leaders to hold a vote on raising the minimum wage. Unlike many White House staffers (and members of Congress), minimum wage workers don’t get automatic cost of living raises and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997.

Democrats, who are backing a minimum wage increase to $7.25 an hour as outlined in a bill by Rep George Miller (D-Calif.), tried to block debate on another bill until the House votes on the minimum wage. Although two Republicans joined the Democrats, the move failed along party lines.

House Republicans have refused to bring a minimum wage raise to a vote, even going so far as to bottle up to the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations bill because it includes an amendment to raise the minimum wage by $2.10 an hour. They’ve derailed other attempts to force a vote.

However, House Republicans, who are feeling the heat to do something about the minimum wage, are expected to cobble together a package that will link a minimum wage increase to more business tax breaks or changes in labor law that could eliminate overtime pay for millions of worker or deny minimum wage protection to others. Senate Republicans pulled a similar stunt last month and were able to defeat a move by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) to raise the minimum wage.

(Click here to check out the latest developments in the state battle to raise the minimum wage.)

Back to White House pay for just a minute. The folks over at Think Progress carefully studied the list of salaries and thoroughly analyzed the job titles to come up with the “The Four Most Overpaid White House Staffers.”

They are…drum roll, please…two ethics advisors, the director for lessons learned and the director of fact checking. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

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