All through a long Wednesday, members of Congress preened and expressed pleasure with their handiwork. In concert with President Bush, Democrats and Republicans came up with a plan to raise the minimum wage for the first time in nine years.
A mighty bipartisan effort by men and women of good will, most of them making at least $89,500 a year before perks and wanting more, will lift the current hourly minimum rate of $3.35 an hour to $3.80 next April. From there, it`s onward and upward to $4.25 an hour by April, 1991.
There is no need for the working poor, as members of Congress love to call them, to rush out and price new automobiles. But the federal largesse does mean that 17 months from now, a person working full time and making the minimum wage will be earning a splendiferous annual salary of $8,840 for his or her labors.
Congress, of course, is concerned that all that money be meted out responsibly. The pecksniffs and would-be social engineers who constructed this minimum-wage compromise couldn`t simply turn over a 45-cent-an-hour raise that is nine years overdue.
So, for the first time in American history, they established a two-tiered system by approving a training wage wherein workers age 16 to 19 in the first three months of their work experience will be paid only 85 percent of the minimum wage (or $3.23 an hour).
In the context of this so-called compromise, Bush got a shorter training- wage period than the six months he wanted, but he attained at least a symbolic political victory. Congressional supporters of the increase, impatient with nine years of waiting, simply opted to take the money and run. The operative illusion with the training wage is that employers will actually train workers making 85 percent of $4.25 an hour to be rocket scientists, or podiatrists or prize-winning journalists.
At bottom, the training wage is nothing more than a politically expedient sop to employers and small businessmen who`ve enjoyed nine years of static pay scales and who aren`t enthralled with the notion of having to pay more than $130 a week for the labor of others.
Who are these people? Clearly many members of Congress don`t know. Listen to them talk and you`ll come away thinking the minimum wage is something kids at the country club collect in the summer.
You may believe that most of those earning this pitiful wage are teenagers flipping hamburgers in fast-food joints down at the mall. But you`d be wrong.
According to congressional research figures, more than 25 percent of those earning the minimum wage are heads of households. More than 60 percent are women, millions of whom are raising children alone.
The rest of the tired argument against raising the minimum wage is that it benefits a relatively small number of working Americans.
Presidents, members of Congress, economists and editorial writers take comfort in the fact that only about 6 percent of the hourly work force finds itself subsisting on the current $3.35.
Many of the recipients, the argument drones on, are teenagers, some of whom are trying to buy a CD player, some of whom are helping to augment the family income.
By a curious leap of logic, this work is devalued by critics of the minimum wage increase. Why isn`t a teenager punching a clock entitled to some measure of payday dignity?
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Then there are those hundreds of thousands of jobs that critics insist will disappear when the minimum wage goes up.
That same Chamber of Commerce argument has been made every time the minimum wage has been raised in its 50-year history. And it`s been shown to be fallacious every time out.
Still, our guardians on Capitol Hill and in the White House were determined to not simply cough up the money for the poorest workers.
The federal government may have let the savings and loan industry be ransacked, leaving taxpayers with a $200 billion tab. The same government may have looked the other way for eight years as the Department of Housing and Urban Development was systematically looted from the inside out.
We know all about those $700 million bombers and $600 military wrenches, but when it comes to a little something extra in the pay envelope for janitorial workers and restaurant workers and part-time laborers, this government is nothing if not careful.
No one making $170, before taxes, for a 40-hour week, is going to get the best of George Bush and his friends in Congress.