Minimum Wage Fairness Act - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. President, I rise today to speak about the importance of raising the minimum wage.
People truly deserve a fair shot at the American dream, and it is time to come together to raise the minimum wage.
Our State just raised the minimum wage. We actually had one of the lowest minimum wages in the country--$6.15 per hour--and we are now at $9.50 per hour. So that was a major jump up. It was something that was needed, and it had a lot of support in the State of Minnesota, a State that has a very strong economy, with an unemployment rate of only 4.8 percent. But even when they have jobs people still have found it very hard to afford basic things or to send their kids to college.
We should follow Minnesota's example. We should raise the Federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour.
I am a cosponsor of the Minimum Wage Fairness Act. I want to thank Senator Harkin for his leadership on this issue and his dedication to the working families of America.
I also want to thank Senator Merkley and all of my colleagues who have worked tirelessly to raise the minimum wage.
As the Senate chair of the Joint Economic Committee, I held a hearing on income inequality earlier this year with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. His data showed--and this is a number I will never forget--that the top 400 people in this country--the top 400 people--have the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50 percent of Americans. This means that half of Americans--of everyone in this country--have the same amount of wealth as the top 400 people.
So how do we address this? We know there are a lot of things we need to do: training people who do not have the jobs and do not have the skills right now, increasing exports, immigration reform--there are all kinds of things we can do. But we know one major thing we can do to help an individual family have a fair shot is to increase the minimum wage.
Like many of my colleagues who have spoken today, I worked my fair share of minimum-wage jobs. I started as a carhop at the A&W Root Beer stand in Wayzata, MN. I then graduated to being a waitress, for about 3 years, at Bakers Square pie shop, where I once spilled 12 iced teas on 1 customer. That is when I decided to go to law school. But I worked those jobs, and it gave me a sense of what it was like for some of the people I worked with--that this was their job, this was their job cutting pies, this was their job washing dishes. This was how they supported themselves. It gave me a sense of how important it is to look out for those people who are doing the work we depend on every single day.
Think of how this affects women. Two-thirds of today's families rely on the mother's income in some way. Mothers are the primary breadwinners in more than one-third of families. Yet we also know that women make up nearly two-thirds of all the workers who earn the minimum wage or less.
An example of this is a waitress named Tiffany from Houston, TX, who recently came to Washington. We did an event together and answered questions. Her story is the story of so many American women across this country. She is a single mom. She loves her daughter so much. She is working as a waitress, and many times, with the way the laws work down in Texas, she does not make many tips in one night. So what does she do? She fills in by working on holidays. She has worked many Christmas Eves. She has missed every single Halloween with her daughter because it was a good night to be working at the bar at the restaurant. She has missed all kinds of other holidays, and she went through them, as we stood there.
You think to yourself: Sometimes, especially when you first start off, that happens. I have had it happen. But it should not keep happening after you have worked years and years at the same place. But it is just one example of what our minimum-wage workers have to do to try to make ends meet. They have to work another job. They have to work a holiday. They have to work another shift. That goes on every single day in America.
A woman working full time in a minimum-wage job only makes about $15,000 per year, which is not enough for her to work her way out of poverty. It is not enough for her to send herself or her kids to college. A full-time job should not mean full-time poverty.
Today, more than 15 million women in America are counting on us to help them get a fairer wage. Many of them, as I noted, are working in demanding retail and hospitality jobs--as waitresses, store clerks, hotel maids--where they are on their feet and they are running all day. They may not be able to come here today and sit in the gallery and say: Hey, I need a raise. So we have to be their voices. We have to talk for them today.
Despite their hard work, they have an almost impossible time making ends met. They struggle to afford the basics--a decent place to live or food for their family, never mind being able to save for a rainy day or for college or for their own retirement.
I released a Joint Economic Committee report on Earnings, Income and Retirement Security for Women. One striking thing we saw in this report is that a woman's lower lifetime earnings means lower retirement security. So this is more than about today's wages. This is about an entire lifespan. Women live longer. If they are making less, if their minimum wage does not allow them to save for retirement, it is even tougher for them in their golden years.
There is also a strong economic case for raising the minimum wage today. Low-wage workers would see their earnings increase by $31 billion if we raise the minimum wage. And we know what they are going to do with this. They are going to try to save a little of it, but they are going to spend it. They are going to spend it in Washington State. They are going to spend it in West Virginia. They are going to spend it on clothes for their kids, on food for their families, and filling up their gas tanks. They are going to help keep the economy going.
I once saw a documentary that Robert Reich did where he talked to a major CEO with tons of money. He took him into his room, and he said: OK. I only have three pairs of jeans. How can you really have more than three pairs of jeans? Maybe you could have four, but you really don't need more than that.
His point was this: If we want to have an economy that works, we cannot have all of the profits and money sucked up by the people who run things. We want them to be rewarded for their work, but they can only buy so many jeans.
If you have that money go fairly across the spectrum, then everyone gets to buy their pair of jeans. What we are doing is literally cutting down our markets by not making sure--in a consumer-driven economy, where 70 percent of our economy is consumer driven, we are putting ourselves in a situation where people are not able to buy things.
We also know that raising the minimum wage is good for business. We know that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour could help approximately 28 million workers, with almost half of the benefits going to households with incomes below $35,000 per year.
We know that more than 15 million women would receive a raise. We know that $31 billion would be added to our economy. We know that seven Nobel laureates in economics, along with over 600 economists, support raising the minimum wage to restore the value that has been lost to inflation over the years. The minimum wage is now a third of the value of what it was in 1968.
It was the beloved late Paul Wellstone of my State who famously said: ``We all do better when we all do better.'' If he were here today, that is what he would be saying. I know it is still true, and so do my colleagues who join me today. We need to be focused on doing better so we all do better.
With this in mind, I urge my colleagues to join me in fighting for working families, and especially the working women of this country, to give them a fair shot and pass a long overdue minimum-wage increase.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source