Date: 2007-01-10
Speaker: GEORGE MILLER (democrat)
Chamber: H
State: California

Mr. Speaker. I yield 3/4 minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Wu). a member of the committee. (Mr. WU asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.) Mr. WU. Mr. Speaker. I have a statement which I will submit for the RECORD. but I want to speak for a moment from my personal experience. I have owned a business. I have met PL payroll. But I have also worked for relatively low wages. I have worked in decommissioned ships that were both extremely hot in the hold and also filled with asbestos. I have worked in a dog food factory. But my real minimum wage job was as an assistant dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant owned by friends of my parents. I saw how hard those fulltime workers worked. I wag an assistant dishwasher. and I saw how the fulltime dishwasher got his fingers burned. how the cooks got their hands cut. And they worked for minimum wage just like me. but I was a teenager. And I came home to my parents home. I said to my parents. Those people work awfully hard. and they deserve more. We ought to have a union. I never got to go back to work at my parents friends restaurant. There are times when there is unequal bargaining power. when there are market failures. and there is a very legitimate role for the public sector and for joint action. I ask my friends on the other side of the aisle whether they would roll back the 40hour work week. I ask my friends if they would roll back worker safety provisions and roll back child labor laws. Your time has passed a century ago. It is long due to pass an increase in the minimum wage. I rise in strong support of raising the minimum wage. We tend to assume that employment isthe solution to poverty. And in the past we have enacted legislation that reflects our commitment to training and placing individuals into jobs. While I strongly support efforts to increase employment. a job is not the complete answer to poverty. Far too many families who work full time still live below the poverty line. In fact. since the late 1970s. the number of fulltime workers who live in poverty has doubled. The reason for this is our low minimum wage. In 1996. after a 5year freeze. Congress enacted legislation to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to $5.15 an hourstill well below the value of the minimum wage at its in peak in 1968 at $8.49 in 2005 dollars. Now. 10 years have passed without an increase in the minimum wage. Meanwhile. the number of Americans who live in poverty has increased by 5.4 million during the Bush administration. Today. a minimum wage worker working full time earns only half the poverty level for a family of four. A single parent working full time at the current minimum wage cannot support one child above the poverty threshold. More than onequarter. 26 percent. of the 13 million workers who would benefit from a minimum wage increase are parents. Sixty percent of these workers are women. History has shown that a minimum wage increase does not decrease employment or increase inflation. In fact. in the four years after the last minimum wage increase passed. the economy experienced its strongest growth in over three decades. Yet a minimum wage increase does raise the wages of lowincome workers in general. even those who earn more than the minimum wage. the "lifting all boats" effect of an increase in the minimum wage. It moves working families out of poverty. Unfortunately. the Republicans leadership has resisted all efforts to increase the minimum wage. The Fair Minimum Wage Act. of which I am proud to be an original cosponsor. will raise the minimum wage to $7.25 over a 2year period. It is time to raise the. minimum wage. No one should work full time jobs. or even work multiple jobs. and still live in poverty.