Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007--Continued

FAIR MINIMUM WAGE ACT OF 2007--Continued -- (Senate - January 23, 2007)

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Mr. SANDERS. Madam President, I rise today in strong support of the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. I commend Senator Kennedy for his leadership on this issue. This important legislation would increase the Federal minimum wage from the abysmally low $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour over a 2-year period.

Let us make no mistake about it, this bill will benefit millions of workers and their families. It is very long overdue. Anyone who works 40 hours a week in the United States of America should not be living in abject poverty. It is a moral disgrace that Congress has not increased the minimum wage since 1997. Yes, Congress has provided hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to people who don't need it, but somehow, over a 10-year period, Congress has not reached out to millions of workers making the minimum wage and raised that wage.

Today's minimum wage workers have less buying power than minimum wage workers did back in 1955, when Dwight Eisenhower was President. Simply put, a job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in poverty.

At the current Federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, a person working full time makes less than $11,000 per year before taxes, which is approximately $6,000 below the Federal poverty line for a family of three.

Moreover, while the cost of living has skyrocketed, the value of the minimum wage has eroded by over 20 percent since the last increase. Today, nearly 13 million workers, 10 percent of the United States workforce, would directly or indirectly benefit from a raise in the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour; 5.5 million workers would benefit directly, 7.4 million workers would benefit indirectly, and more than 60 percent of those who would benefit are women.

In addition to workers, millions of American families would benefit from a raise in the minimum wage, including nearly 6 million children who would see their parents' earnings increase.

But some will argue that an increase in the minimum wage will primarily benefit teenagers. I think the evidence is quite strong that that is not the case. Further, recently, over 650 economists, including Nobel Prize winners and past presidents of the American Economics Association, released a statement calling for a raise in the minimum wage. They confirm that ``a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed. ..... The weight of the evidence suggests that modest increases in the minimum wage have very little or no effect on employment.'

Moreover, and interestingly, a recent Gallup Poll revealed that 86 percent of small business owners today do not believe that an increase in the minimum wage would hurt their business. Three-fourths of small business owners thought a 10-percent increase would have no effect on them. In fact, nearly half of those polled thought the minimum wage should be increased.

While I believe it is important to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, it is clear to me that much more needs to be done. We should see this increase--long overdue--in the minimum wage as simply a start to address the disgraceful reality that more and more of our fellow Americans are living in poverty, and it is an outrage that today in the United States of America we have, by far, the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world.

In the last 10 years, what we have seen in our country is a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires. We have seen the wealthiest people become ever wealthier. But what we have also seen, since President Bush has been in office, is that over 5 million more Americans have slipped into poverty. The rich become richer, the poor become poorer, and the middle class continues to shrink. In my view, raising the minimum wage is an important start in attempting to address the crisis of poverty in America, but it is clear to me that we have to do much more. Among many other things we have to do, we must address the reality in America today that we are losing millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs and good-paying white-collar information technology jobs because of our disastrous trade agreements.

The time is now to begin to fundamentally rethink our trade agreements so we can begin to create good-paying jobs here in the United States, so our young people will be able to make it to the middle class rather than to continue to struggle year after year in poverty.

We have to take a hard look at the National Labor Relations Act and the National Labor Relations Board, which today make it increasingly hard for workers to form unions. If workers are able to collectively negotiate a contract, very often the wages they get will be substantially higher than if they did not have a union. So in raising the minimum wage, what we are doing today is saying to millions of workers who are struggling desperately to keep their heads above water, we understand what you are going through. We understand it is an outrage that for a 10-year period this Congress has not raised the minimum wage, and the purchasing value of the minimum wage has declined. But I hope that what we are doing this week is simply a start to address the very serious economic problems facing not only low-income Americans but the middle class as well.

I hope that this Senate, this Congress, will begin focusing its attention on the decline of the middle class, the increase of poverty, and come up with economic and fiscal policies that benefit all Americans and not just the wealthy and large multinational corporations.

I yield the floor.

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