Raise the Wage Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MEUSER. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.

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Mr. MEUSER. I am, in its current form.

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Mr. MEUSER. Mr. Speaker, this motion will not delay passage of this bill or return it to committee. It is our last opportunity as a House to amend this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I am here to offer a motion to recommit that is about small business survival. It is about protecting the 8 million minority- owned small businesses, the 9.9 million women-owned small businesses, and the 2.5 million veteran-owned small businesses around the country from the devastating repercussions of H.R. 582.

With this motion to recommit, employers with fewer than 10 employees or annual sales under $1 million will not be forced to implement a $15- per-hour minimum wage.

If this amendment is adopted, mom-and-pop shops across the country will be protected from this bill's extreme and unnecessary one-size- fits-all Washington mandate.

Small businesses employ almost half of all U.S. employees and account for two-thirds of net new jobs. 99.9 percent of U.S. businesses are small.

We know small businesses and their employees are the most vulnerable to this radical and unprecedented increase in the Federal minimum wage. The National Federation of Independent Business estimates that businesses with fewer than 500 employees will account for 57 percent of jobs lost due to this bill, and businesses with fewer than 100 employees will account for 43 percent of jobs lost.

Yet my Democrat colleagues have done nothing to protect these job creators from a 107 percent minimum wage hike. Instead, this legislation treats big and small businesses exactly same.

Without the financial resilience needed to absorb the increase in bottom-line costs that this legislation will bring about, small businesses and towns in every congressional district will be forced to make very tough choices: Do they lay off workers? Raise prices on their customers? Replace workers with robotics? Or shut their doors completely?

Congress should not force our Nation's smallest and most vital job creators to make those kinds of decisions.

Small business workers and their families will also take a significant hit. The nonpartisan CBO backs up this reality, reporting that mandating a $15 minimum wage would ``reduce business income and raise prices as higher labor costs would be absorbed by business owners and then passed on to consumers.''

From coast to coast, we have already seen real-world examples of how workers and employers would be punished by this socialist policy. One study found that Washington-knows-best mandates that stretch across our Nation--or better known as socialist policies--we have real-world examples showing that they simply do not work.

There was a very thorough study by Washington State University which showed, in Seattle, a $15 minimum wage law reduced total income paid to the city's low-wage workers by $120 million per year in that one city alone.

The cost of living in Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City, where a $15 minimum wage is already in place, or soon to be, is much higher than my district in Pennsylvania. With such disparities in the cost of living across the country, imagine what a wage hike will do to rural areas, rural workers represented by many of us in Congress.

Mr. Speaker, despite today's booming economy and rising wages, supporters of H.R. 582 think it is best to force a punishing, Washington one-size-fits-all wage hike on small businesses across America.

A small business owner in the State of Washington actually said it best:

Congress should not and cannot mandate its way to wage growth and prosperity, because those mandates hit small business hardest.

Mr. Speaker, even the liberal Washington Post said yesterday: ``There is a trade-off in raising the minimum wage so substantially.''

The Washington Post went on to say: ``Those who would lose out, in the form of no job at all, would wind up not with less pay but with no pay.''

I urge all my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this modest but important amendment to H.R. 582. The small businesses and their workers back home in each and every one of our districts will thank us for protecting their livelihood.

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Mr. MEUSER. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

A recorded vote was ordered.

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