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

Mr. Speaker. I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker. I want to begin by commending you for the job you did in the chair today and the manner in which you conducted the debate on this issue. and I appreciate the professionalism with which you handled the gavel. Mr. Speaker. Members of the House. I want to thank all of our colleagues who participated in the debate today. We have our differences of opinions. but I thought that the debate was well conducted. We have waited for over 10 years to have this vote on the minimum wage. a clean vote on the minimum wage for the poorest workers in this country who have worked at a wage that is 10 years old. You know. very often Members of Congress will take the floor and they will harken back to the time in their youth when they worked at the minimum wage and they will talk about the different jobs they had. Well. let me share with you that I. too. share those experiences. I cleaned out oil tanks. I cleaned out ships. I drove trucks in the pear orchards. I picked fruit. I worked in the canneries. and sometimes I did two of those at the same time. I worked at night in the cannery and in the daytime in the oil refinery. I worked at the minimum wage. I wonder how I would have felt about that minimum wage if it had been 10 years old. If I was working at the minimum wage and my wages were 10 years into the past and everybody else working around me had current wages. I wonder how angry I would have been if I would have had to support a familyat one point I was supporting a family with those minimum wage jobsI would have been very angry. I would have thought this was a very unfair system. that my wages were stuck 10 years in the past and everybody elses wages were current. Well. that is what has happened to these workers up until today. Today. we finally release them from being frozen in time. where their wages are from 10 years ago. but when they go to the � supermarket. the food prices are higher. when they put gasoline in the car. the gasoline prices are higher. when they pay the utility bills. the utility bills are higher. when their kids get sick. the medical bills are higher. All of those things are higher. They are living in 2007. but in their wages they are living in 1997. There is something terribly. terribly wrong with that picture. That- is why overwhelmingly throughout the country the people support this effort now to raise the minimum wage. Eightynine percent of the people believe that we should do this. and they basically believe it as a matter of economic fairness. of economic justice to these people who are working so hard at minimum wage. who. as we say over and over again. but remember what they are. they are the poorest paid workers in America today. And when they turn on the TV. when they watch it on their lunch break. they see a CEO walk away with $210 million and a golden handshake after that CEO took a good corporation and ran it into the ditch. They see people backdating stock options. they see people defrauding the corporation for extra compensation. and yet their wages are back in time. This is a question of economic fairness that the American public overwhelmingly responded to in this past election. and it is this issue of economic fairness that our new speaker. NANCY PELOSI. said would be the subject of this hundred hours. that we would begin by trying to make America a fairer place for those who go to work and for those who try to provide for their families. We would make America a fairer place and we would begin by increasing the minimum wage. and that is what we are going to do in the next few minutes. when we receive a strong and a bipartisan vote to increase the minimum wage for these workers. It is terribly important that we do this. It says something about us as a Nation. When it is questioned all over the world about the economic disparities in American society. the unfairness of it. we get a chance to begin that process to change that dynamic. I think this is a wonderful moment for the House of Representatives. no matter what side of the aisle you sit on. We. the peoples House. are going to address the needs of the people that we were elected to serve. They grant us. they grant us the authority and the ability and the honor to come to the Congress of the United States. and today. and today we are going to address their needs. Today. we are going to address the needs that have concerned them in their communities. If I have any time left. I want to thank the new majority leader for his efforts over these 10 years to try to bring this vote to the floor when time and time again he made that effort in the Appropriations Committee.