Congress raises its own wage, defeats an increase in the minimum wage

Hunger Notes

(June 22, 2006) On June 17, Congress voted itself a pay increase; on June 21, the Senate defeated minimum wage legislation, which, following an earlier defeat in the House, almost certainly ending the possibility of an increase in the minimum wage this year. 

Thus Congress has failed to raise the minimum wage---$5.15 per hour--since 1997, while voting itself eight pay raises during the same period.

The Senate rejected by six votes an amendment by Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) to the Department of Defense authorization bill, which would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Since Congress last raised the minimum wage in 1997, its real value has eroded more than 20 percent due to inflation. A person who works 52 weeks a year, 40 hours a week at the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour earns just $10,700 - $6,000 below the federal poverty level of $16,660 for a family of three. Sixty-one percent of minimum wage workers are women.

"The base pay for a congressperson is $168,500," noted Rick Wilson, director of the American Friends Service Committee's West Virginia Economic Justice Project, who played a leading role in the successful drive to raise the minimum wage in that state. "Contrast this to the experience of a single mother of two who earns $10,712 a year, working 40-hour weeks without a break." "The single mom would have to work 15.7 years at 40 hours per week to earn what the congressperson does," Wilson notes in his blog, at www.goatrope.blogspot.com. "In fact, she'd have to work about 641 hours just to make as much as the congressional cost-of-living increase."

This article was based on various sources including wire services and the American Friends Service Committee press release on the topic, which appears on the Common Dreams newswire site at http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0621-13.htm

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