by Mike Hall, Aug 20, 2006

It’s not like anyone expected him to send flowers or a card. But you would think President Bush, who has recently been leading cheers about the supposed great shape of the nation’s economy like a teenager who’s gone a little too deep into the Red Bull, might have remembered it was 10 years ago today—Aug. 20, 1996—that the last minimum wage increase was signed into law.

Bush, after a meeting with his economic advisors Friday, told reporters how proud he is of his economic policies and pointed to massive tax cuts—almost exclusively for the wealthy—as the so-called engine of his imagined economic boom. He didn’t mention that for past 10 years and for the entire tenure of his presidency, millions of hard-working men and women got up every day to go work for $5.15 an hour—$5.15 an hour then, $5.15 an hour now and $5.15 an hour every day in between.

That $5.15 an hour doesn’t buy nearly as much in this age of $3-a-gallon-plus gasoline prices and out-of-this-world health care and housing costs. The minimum wage is at a 51-year low in buying power.

In his talk to reporters, Bush ignored the fact that his administration and its Republican allies in Congress have turned their backs on America’s low-wage workers for the past decade. They’ve killed every effort to increase the minimum wage or loaded up legislation with “poison pills” like estate tax cuts for millionaires, attacks on labor law protections such as overtime eligibility and even cutting the pay of tipped workers—that Democrats have been forced to stand against those cynical wage bills.

The AFL-CIO’s America Needs a Raise Campaign is rolling along in the states, mobilizing for ballot initiatives and legislation to raise state minimum wage levels, and fighting on the federal level to pass legislation boosting the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour–with no poison pills.

Maybe in the near future we will have another date to mark each year—the day the minimum wage is finally raised again. But meanwhile, it’s not such a happy anniversary for the millions of America’s workers still busting their tails for $5.15 an hour.

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