Minimum Wage Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Madam President, I have listened, as my friends--and they are my friends--and colleagues have come to the floor to talk about the Keystone XL Pipeline.

It turns out that what America needs more than anything else--more than an increase in the minimum wage, more than paycheck fairness so that men and women are paid fairly in the workplace--more than anything else, we need one more pipeline coming in from Canada.

If you listen to the other side, you would think the jobs that will be created by the Keystone XL Pipeline will finally turn this economy around.

How many jobs are we talking about? Madam President, 2,000--2,000 construction jobs? That is at the high end of estimates I have heard. How many jobs at the refineries in Texas to process this oil and ship it overseas? It is not for sale in the United States. I am not sure. But it really is amazing to me that they continue to focus on Keystone XL as if it is the only issue when it comes to the American economy.

Here is what I find particularly curious. For the record--and I am glad my friend, the Senator from North Dakota, is still in the Chamber--the Keystone XL Pipeline is not the first Keystone Pipeline. The first Keystone Pipeline, from Alberta, came into the United States and ended up in Wood River, IL, at the Conoco refinery. It is shipping Canadian tar sands down to be refined at the Conoco refinery. And then, after it is refined, in a pipeline it is distributed all across the United States.

If no Keystone XL Pipeline is ever built--and I do not know whether it will or will not be--there will still be a steady flow of Canadian tar sands into America for refining.

Just this week, Senator Kirk and I met with the North American president of BP. They have a huge refinery in Whiting, IN, at the south end of Lake Michigan. They are refining Canadian tar sands into oil that can be sold in different products.

I asked the head of the North American operations for BP what is going to happen to that refinery when it comes to Canadian tar sands? He said: We are going to triple--triple--our capacity to deal with Canadian tar sands. He did not say contingent on the Keystone XL. Because, you see, there is a vast network of pipelines moving Canadian tar sands to the United States already, and they are already going through a refinery--many of them--even the BP refinery in northern Indiana.

So this notion that we are somehow turning off the Canadian tar sands coming into the United States--if someone is suggesting that, I would ask them to bring proof to the floor. We are not.

What the President is doing is trying to make a decision on what is best for this country and our economy. He is trying to weigh it in a thoughtful manner. There is an element that needs to be part of this record. The President is trying to take into consideration the environment. I think he should. I think it is his responsibility.

We had a debate several weeks ago on the floor of the Senate. It was about global warming and climate change. It went on through the night. Many of my Democratic colleagues stayed up all night to talk about it. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island spoke at great length with their colleagues about the issue.

I came up early in the debate and simply made one point. I believe the Republican Party of the United States is the only major political party in the world--in the world--that denies climate change and global warming. I have asked my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to give me an example. Tell me where I am wrong. Somebody said there may be a party in Australia. That is where they have to reach to find any other political party in the world that agrees with their position on global warming and climate change. So it is no wonder when we discuss energy and the future they do not want to talk about what is happening to our environment, the extreme weather situation we are even seeing this week, the devastation from storms in a magnitude we have never registered since we kept records.

What the President is trying to do is to take into consideration not just energy but also our environment, so ultimately we leave a world to our children and grandchildren which is safer and cleaner than the one we have today. My friend the Senator from Wyoming, Mr. Barrasso, came to the floor and talked about what he called a highly secretive, high-level meeting in Chicago, and then he proceeded to say at what hotel it was being held. It is not much of a secret if he knows where it is being held.

It is true there are meetings of people who oppose the Keystone Pipeline and support candidates who oppose it, as there are meetings of those who support the pipeline and support the candidates who join in their position. That happens to be the nature of the political scene. He even suggested that the person opposed to the pipeline was going to put $100 million into this campaign.

I, for one, would like to see an end to big money in our political campaigns. I would certainly like to see transparency and where it is coming from and how it is being spent, but the reality is, the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court across the street changed the rules and people can play with big money now, a lot of their own.

What he did not mention were the Koch brothers. I would like to mention them for a moment because they are relevant to this discussion about Canadian tar sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Koch brothers are very wealthy, billionaires. They come to play when it comes to the American political scene. In the last cycle, we were able to identify over $248 million these two brothers spent on political causes and campaigns around the United States, and we are told they are going to spend considerably more than that this time around.

Do the Koch brothers have an agenda when it comes to this issue? Let me give an illustration. It was about 3 months ago that I went into the southeast corner of the city of Chicago, an old steel mill neighborhood, which happens to be in the neighborhood where Barrack Obama, fresh out of college, was a community organizer. They are modest homes, frame homes, primarily Hispanic and African-American populations.

They called me down to this section, the southeastern section of the city of Chicago, to show me something. What they wanted to show me were piles of black soot. It is called petcoke. Petcoke is what is left after you take the Canadian tar sands, ship them through the pipeline to a refinery, making diesel fuel, aviation fuel and gasoline. What is left over, this black gunk substance called petcoke.

It turns out that the BP refinery was selling the petcoke to a company owned by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers were shipping this petcoke into the neighborhoods of Chicago. The mothers with their kids were calling me to their homes and schools to show me what happened when the wind blew. When the wind blew, this nasty black stuff flew through the air. It was all over windowsills and buildings, nasty as can be.

The city of Chicago is doing something about it. They are kind of changing the equation in terms of petcoke and what you have to do to store it. But if the other side is coming to the floor and saying our people are pure of heart, they just want to see the Keystone XL Pipeline, the fact is, the largest benefactors to the Republican Party in the United States today, the Koch brothers, have a financial and commercial interest in these Canadian tar sands, at least in the disposal of this petcoke. The way they were doing it in the city of Chicago was the height of corporate irresponsibility--just pile it and let the wind blow it across the neighborhood. It is going to be criminal when it is all over after the city of Chicago changes its laws to prohibit this kind of conduct.

But those are the things that are at stake in this conversation. I hope at the end of the day the President makes the right, thoughtful decision, not just in terms of energy but in terms of our environment, does the best thing for America. I hope we also understand that if we do nothing with the Keystone XL Pipeline, we are still going to face the challenges with Canadian tar sands, coming down through the United States, being refined and sold in our country and around the world. It is a challenge we have to face honestly.

I may disagree with some of my colleagues on the other side. I believe that if we want to leave a world for future generations--our kids, our grandchildren--that is a cleaner and safer world, we have to accept some responsibility in our generation, in our time, to clean up the mess of this environment. It may call for some sacrifice as individuals, as families, as businesses, but I do not think it is too much to ask.

God gave us this great world and asked us to keep an eye on it for the next generation. Are we going to do it or will we ignore it and say: If there is money to be made, we can start bringing in any source you wish. That to me is irresponsible.

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MINIMUM WAGE

Tomorrow, we are going to have an important vote. It is a vote that is going to be watched carefully by over 1 million workers in the State of Illinois and millions across our Nation. The question is whether the United States of America and its government will increase the minimum wage for workers all across the country.

It is an important vote. It would raise the Federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 in three steps of 95 cents each. If we pass it this year, the final increase would occur in the year 2016. This is a 39-percent increase in the minimum wage, roughly the same percentagewise as the last minimum wage bill we enacted over the same period of time. It provides for automatic future increases in the minimum wage based on the cost of living so we do not have those lurches from one level to $2 or $3 above it.

It raises the minimum wage for tipped workers for the first time in more than 20 years. People find it hard to believe that under Federal standards, tipped workers receive $2.13 an hour as their base wage. They are expected to make up the difference with their tips. We raise it to 70 percent of the minimum wage, phased in over 6 years. We extend some business expensing rules to help businesses invest in their equipment and what they need to grow the business. We do this in a fashion to incentivize small businesses to grow.

This increase in the minimum wage brings us down to a very fundamental question as Americans. The fundamental question is this: If someone is willing to get up and go to work and work hard every single day, should they receive a compensation that lets them get by so they do not have to survive from paycheck to paycheck or should they be put in a position where the only way they can survive is with government assistance--food stamps, SNAP program, child care subsidies--things that we provide as a government to people in low-income categories?

Keep in mind, we are talking about workers. You see them in Chicago early in the morning. They are the blurry-eyed travelers on those buses heading off to the workplace. They are the ones we see on the trains, quietly moving from their homes to where they work and repeating the reverse journey every single day as they head back home at night.

Can you imagine the frustration of going through that day after weary day and never, ever catching up, living paycheck to paycheck, falling further and further behind? That is what is happening to too many of them. It is amazing to me when we hear the critics of minimum wages step forward. In our State of Illinois there are two prominent politicians, both of them happen to be multimillionaires. Their views on minimum wage are amazing to me. One of them, who made $53 million last year, said he adamantly opposes raising the minimum wage. He made $53 million last year. He adamantly opposes raising the minimum wage.

Another one of them who is worth millions of dollars himself has said: I will agree to raise the minimum wage but only for people over the age of 26.

He just eliminated half of the people earning the minimum wage in America today who happen to be under the age of 26.

Let's think about the people whom he wants to keep on a subminimum wage. It would include all college students under the age of 26 trying to work their way through school. He would want to give them a subminimum wage. It would include single moms raising their kids--the moms being under the age of 26, they would get a subminimum wage--and it would also include veterans coming back, struggling to find a job. If they haven't reached the age of 26, he would give them a subminimum wage.

I have one basic question: What are these politicians thinking? Have they ever left where they live and where they work and met up with some people who are struggling paycheck to paycheck to get by?

Tomorrow we have a chance on the floor of the Senate to raise the minimum wage, but we cannot do it with Democratic votes alone. If there will not be five, six or seven Republicans who cross the aisle and join us in this debate, it will fail--and that will be a sad day--because for a lot of these workers this is their only hope that they will get a decent increase in the minimum wage through the law.

I hope my colleagues on the other side will take into consideration that so many of these workers are women and so many of them are even over the age of 35 and still rely on minimum wage jobs. These are not lazy people. These are hard-working people, people who are working hard every single day for a paycheck that they know is not going to cover their expenses every single week.

It is time we give them a chance and give them a break. It used to be--and I can remember it very well--a bipartisan issue to raise the minimum wage.

President Ronald Reagan, when he was President, raised the minimum wage. He understood it. If you value work and you value working people, you should give them a wage which respects the integrity and decency of work. That is what this is about. That is what this minimum wage is about tomorrow.

Without the help of Republicans, it will fail. If it isn't done on a bipartisan basis, it will not go forward.

I might add one other item. A minimum wage is injecting into the economy literally millions of dollars of purchasing power. People who are living paycheck to paycheck spend those checks as fast as they can for food, clothing or shoes, paying the utility bills, paying for a cell phone, putting gas in a car. That money goes right back into the economy.

I ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, tomorrow break with some of the extreme people in your party, join us in a bipartisan fashion and raise the minimum wage. It is only fair.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska.

Mr. BEGICH. Before the Senator leaves I would like to ask him a quick question if I could. I know he talked toward the end of his comments--and I am going to speak on minimum wage also--but he mentioned President Reagan. I think the last time minimum wage passed was under President Bush, again a bipartisan approach; is that correct? I wasn't here during those times, but I know the Senator has served in Congress a long time.

Mr. DURBIN. I respond through the Chair to the Senator from Alaska.

There was a time when there wasn't that much controversy associated with this. We knew that we waited too long. People had fallen behind in their earning potential. We had to pick the right number. We came up with it and moved forward on a bipartisan basis. But now things are so partisan and so poisonous in the Senate that even something as basic as raising the minimum wage for hard-working families turns out to be a political lift.

Mr. BEGICH. The $10.10 wage is just getting to the poverty level. That is what I understand and why I cosponsored this legislation.

Mr. DURBIN. It basically does for some, but what I found though is if you are a family with two kids, for example, you have to make almost $15 an hour to get beyond the poverty level. We are talking about $10.10 phased in, and many of those people will still qualify for a helping hand from the government because they are still in very low-income categories.

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