Low-Wage Workers

Floor Speech

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. Thank you, Representative Pocan, for leading us in this Special Order that really talks about so many Americans who are paid poverty wages, people who simply cannot afford to support themselves or their families on the kinds of wages that they are paid, and the role of the Progressive Caucus in helping them to highlight that.

So, on August 29, I was proud at 7 in the morning to arrive at the Rock-n-Roll McDonald's in downtown Chicago. It's one of the most profitable McDonald's, certainly, in our area. I saw a growing crowd of people wearing T-shirts, saying, Strike for 15, and signs that said, We are worth more. In Illinois, the minimum wage is $8.25, so some of them were chanting, We can't survive on $8.25, and they were engaged in this 1-day strike, the demand being $15 an hour and the right to join a union, to form a union.

$15 an hour to work at McDonald's?

If you were to work at McDonald's for 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year--and of course the average employee there works about 24 hours a week--you would at minimum wage make the lavish salary of $31,000 a year, which starts heading you toward the middle class, but it's certainly not a huge salary. Compare that with the CEO of McDonald's, a man named Donald Thompson, whose pay package last year in 2012 was $13.7 million for the year. If you divide that out, he makes an hourly wage of $6,611, and he earns more in the first 2 hours of work on the first day of the year than the workers I was standing with make all year long. Now, these weren't kids. I was out there with some people who have worked at McDonald's for 10 years, 15 years. One gentleman was still making $8.50 an hour. He had climbed up from the minimum wage to $8.50 an hour.

Unless you think that McDonald's isn't thinking about its workers, they actually put out a book, a little book, in conjunction with Visa, called ``Practical Money Skills,'' which is going to help their workers figure out how to budget. They have a budget that lists income from a worker's first job and his second job, admitting that you certainly can't plan to work at McDonald's and live on that, so you have to have a second job--so the first job and second job--all totaling $2,060 for the month.

Then they have recommended monthly expenses to help their workers budget, including $600 a month for housing. Now, I don't know about Madison, Wisconsin, or anywhere else, but in Chicago, unless you live with somebody--or with maybe a couple of somebodies--$600 a month for two jobs and budgeting that way is not going to get you a decent place to live. Remarkably, they budget $20 per month for health insurance, and that exists only in some sort of fantasy world.

These are workers who often turn to government assistance just to make ends meet. These are the people who have often been demonized by our colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle for going for SNAP programs, maybe for housing assistance, for Medicaid. Lots of wealthy Americans and even some of our colleagues suggest we ought to test them for drug use or accuse them of being lazy; but I posit today that the real welfare kings are those fast-food giants and all those poverty-wage employers who refuse to pay a livable wage, a living wage. We, the taxpayers--all the rest of the taxpayers--subsidize them because they don't pay a living wage, so their employees, who are often working their tails off, often have to come to the government for help. I would argue that it's the Walmarts and the McDonald's that really depend on these welfare programs and that, if you want to divide the world into takers and makers, those companies and those CEOs are the real takers.

If I have time, I want to give a couple more facts.

This hasn't always been true in America, these poverty wages. Between 1948 and 1973, the productivity of U.S. workers rose 96.8 percent, and wages rose 93.7 percent. They went up together. Workers benefited from increases in productivity, and that's true of the

wages of the managers and bosses and CEOs as well. Wages went up. Between 1973 and 2011, productivity rose 80.1 percent, but wages rose only 4.2 percent. So you saw that, even though productivity went up, wages stayed essentially flat. Median household income today, adjusted for inflation, is at 1989 levels, and it's not coincidental that during that same time union membership dropped from about one-third of the private sector workforce to about 6.5 percent today; nor is it coincidental that almost all the growth in income--and, yes, we are richer today per capita than ever before. We are at the richest point in our country, but that growth in income has gone, really, especially to the top .1 percent, to the very richest Americans. All of that growth in income has gone to the top.

So I think this is not just bad for the workers that we were out with this summer. This is really bad for our economy. If we want to have a robust middle class, where people can go out and buy things and create demand and, thus, create jobs, they would be the real makers. They would be the people who could revive our economy. I think that the essentials here are a living wage and the rights of workers to be able to collectively bargain so that they can defend themselves together, represent themselves together and get a decent middle class life in this richest country in the world, which is at its very richest stage right now.

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Ms. SCHAKOWSKY. I'll tell you that I have three times now done the SNAP challenge, or the food stamp challenge. The average SNAP benefit is now $4.50 a day. Almost everyone on the SNAP program is on there for less than a year. It has been described to me by a former SNAP recipient as a trampoline. Nobody wants to do it, and they certainly don't want to line up at a food pantry, and those cupboards are really having a problem being filled.

It is hard to do. You can get the calories, but getting the nutrition and the health that you need from the food, that is really hard to do.

People are reluctant to apply for these benefits. I wish they weren't, but there's still some stigma attached to that. I want to encourage people, by the way, that if they are eligible, they should get that for the sake of their children and their own health.

States are struggling right now to meet their Medicaid budgets because there are so many people who are not getting health care through their employer or can't afford it on their own, so they are turning to State and local governments. We're finding that those governments are having to decide about fixing the roads, hiring teachers, or being able to provide these kinds of benefits.

The same kinds of decisions that individual poor people are having to make, governments are having to make right now. But if only they were paid a decent wage for all the hours that they're willing to put in to get up early and get on that bus.

Let me just tell you that I went into McDonald's with some of the workers. They had six things that they were asking for. Listen to the modest requests:

Stop requiring employees to pay out of pocket if their cash registers are short;

Two, show respect to your employees--less shouting and insulting language;

Three, air-conditioning in the kitchen;

Four, permit employees to drink water when the kitchen gets too hot. That one threw me for a big loop. They, said, ``No, they're saying, `Get back to work. You can't have a drink of water.' '' They put it on paper. It's not made up;

Five, give raises and provide living wages;

Listen to this one: stop requiring employees to pay out of pocket for food that is returned by customers.

The whole event was very peaceful. No one at McDonald's was there to accept it, so they left these demands on the counter.

There is one other little point I want to make. This was during the week that we were commemorating the 50th anniversary of the march for jobs and freedom, the March on Washington. The march sought to ``give all Americans a decent standard of living,'' and called for a minimum wage of $2 an hour. If you adjust that $2-an-hour request from 1963, that would equal $15.26 an hour, which is just about what the workers are asking for right now.

The least that we could do here in this Congress is raise the minimum wage in this country, which hasn't been raised for a long time. You probably have that number. I don't remember how long it's been. A $7.25-an-hour minimum wage in this country just doesn't make it.

I also believe we need to do more to guarantee workers the right to organize. I believe that organized labor helped to deliver us the middle class, and I think that workers organized will be able to rejuvenate our middle class and make these just and reasonable demands a reality.

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