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Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007

Date: Jan. 10, 2007
Location: Washington, DC
Issues: Unemployed and Low-Income


FAIR MINIMUM WAGE ACT OF 2007 -- (House of Representatives - January 10, 2007)

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Mr. DOGGETT. Mr. Speaker, the last time the real value of the minimum wage was this low, Elvis was singing ``Heartbreak Hotel.' But these days it is poor working folks, who have the heartbreak when the minimum wage is not even close to being a living wage.

We need to take the minimum for wages and raise it, because there is no maximum for prescription drugs, for tuition, for a visit to the doctor, for filling up a tank of gas. Meanwhile, if the gap between the rich and the poor in this country continues to widen the way it has under the Bush Administration, we will soon have the economic features of a third world country. A CEO earns in two hours what hardworking people earn on the minimum wage in an entire year.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., told workers in 1968, ``It is a crime to live in this rich Nation and receive starvation wages.' And it is a great wrong to deny the nearly one in five workers in Texas who will get a raise as a result of this bill.

A rising tide does not raise all boats if some of them are anchored to the floor by Republican ideology. The kind of objections we have heard today is why it has taken so long to do so little.

After ten years of doing nothing for the hardest workers, let's approve at least this modest increase.

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