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When it Comes to Minimum Wage, Republican Congress Can Run—But Not Hide |
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It looks like members of Congress will run out of town this weekend, on their way back to campaigning for re-election after a two-week session. But while they can run, Republican leaders can’t hide from voters their repeated efforts to prevent an increase in the nation’s $5.15-an-hour minimum wage.
Now, 10 years after Congress approved the last raise, the federal minimum buys less than it has in more than half a century—fewer groceries, far fewer gallons of gasoline, less medicine and less for rent.
At a Capitol Hill press conference today, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney joined Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) to denounce Republican leaders for fleeing to the campaign trail before acting on a long-overdue minimum wage increase.
Says Sweeney:
It is an absolute disgrace that this Republican-led Congress is leaving town without raising the minimum wage for working people.
When working people don’t do their jobs, they risk not getting paid. But when our leaders in Congress refuse to do their job, they not only get paid—they get a raise. Since minimum-wage workers got their last pay raise in 1997, Congress has voted itself nine pay hikes totaling more than $30,000 per year.
Republican leaders in both the Senate and House have used parliamentary maneuvers, legislative trickery and downright deception to block an up-or-down vote on legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour.
Says Kennedy, the main force behind Senate efforts to give working people a raise:
Almost 15 million hard-working Americans would get a well-deserved raise. But the Republican leadership is against the increase. They kowtow to corporate special interests who strongly oppose it. So they’ve had to work hard all year to block what the American people clearly want.
Recent polls show nearly 90 percent of the public backs raising the minimum wage—
support that cuts across party lines.
Says Sweeney:
The American people know what needs to be done….But this Republican Congress has other priorities. Its first priority is to give the richest 8,200 estates in America tax breaks averaging $1.3 million dollars each, which would blow a $753 billion hole in the deficit. In effect, Congress told minimum-wage workers to stand in line behind Paris Hilton and the Wal-Mart heirs—at a time when the average corporate CEO has to work only until lunchtime on the first day of the year to make as much as a minimum-wage worker makes in a year.
Says Durbin:
In America, if you follow the rules, get up and go to work every day, you shouldn’t live in poverty. But as the prices for gas, health care and rent continue to rise, month after month, year after year, President Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress have consistently blocked any increase in the federal minimum wage.
Angered and frustrated by Republicans’ stalling tactics, grass-roots activists at the state level are moving to boost the pay of the nation’s lowest-paid workers. In the upcoming elections, voters in six states will decide on ballot initiatives that seek to boost their states’ minimum wage levels above the current federal rate. More than 30 wage bills have been introduced in state legislatures over the past two years, and lawmakers in 11 states have voted for minimum wage hikes.
Dan Lewandowski, a state senate candidate in Illinois, joined today’s press conference to talk about state wage efforts and his pledge to fight for an increase in the Illinois minimum wage if he unseats a 14-year Republican incumbent. Lewandowski says it’s a matter of economic common sense locally and nationally:
We have to help our working men and women to get more money in their pockets for their expenses When they have more money to spend, that helps the local economy, too.
Joining the lawmakers was Julie Smith, a former minimum-wage worker who spoke about the difficulties facing such workers. She is now working for ACORN on the Ohio ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage.
You can get more info from the AFL-CIO and ACORN, which are working together to raise the minimum wage, by going to the AFL-CIO’s America Needs a Raise website and ACORN’s Taking It to the States site.
Click here to send a message to your U.S. House representative that it’s time for Congress to pass a real minimum wage increase—with no strings attached.
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