Senate to vote on minimum wage proposals

[Ripley]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate is gearing up for a vote on whether to raise the minimum wage for the first time in eight years as Democrats and Republicans offer competing proposals they want to add to bankruptcy legislation.

Looking ahead to the expected votes Monday evening, the Democratic plan would increase the current $5.15 hourly minimum by more than $2. The GOP proposal couples a more modest raise with a change to the 40-hour work week.

The plan from Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, also includes tax and regulatory breaks for small businesses. His amendment would lift the minimum wage by $1.10 over 18 months, in two steps of 55 cents.

The rival proposal from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, would boost the wage to $7.25 in three increments over 26 months.

The bankruptcy bill, long a priority for Republicans, is intended to make it more difficult for people to eliminate personal debts by declaring bankruptcy.

snip>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Santorum is dredging up the flex-time thing again, which is code for killing overtime pay and actually reducing the 40 hr workweek. These guys are trying to destroy every program the Dems ever put in place!

Oops, here's the link (beware, photo of Ricky): http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/05/minimum.wage.ap/index.html

[Demeter]

1. Since the Minimum Wage Should Be $10/hour

to approach a living wage, color me not impressed.

[Name removed]

3. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[TahitiNut]

2. Santorum isn't "reducing the 40 hr workweek." He's increasing it to 50.

What we need is a 36-hour work week, with double time for hours over 36 in a week or over 9 in a day. :shrug:

Even worse, however, is Santorum's broad exemptions for Federal Wage & Hour Standrds. If anything's sure, it's that such purported 'exemptions,' need to be drastically cut back. I'd limit exemptions to those with final hire/fire authority and final financial signature authority for amounts exceeding petty cash and individual expense accounts.

[Ripley]

4. Thanks, I guess I didn't read the article very well.

Need...more...coffee...

I'm sure whatever they pass will result in more layoffs because the poor, oh so poor, small business owners who have $400,000 homes couldn't afford to pay their employees the extra 55 cents. :eyes:

[TahitiNut]

5. Well, we're supposed to believe that employers of minimum wage employees

... do so only out of the goodness of their charitable hearts. We've had many pontificating "DUers" proclaiming the fiction that they're already "loosing" money employing people at minimum wage. That's about the most specious hogwash I've ever heard! It's a wonder that anyone claiming this is able to feed themselves without assistance. :eyes:

[Ripley]

7. I'm "loosing" my mind in here!

I just read an article somewhere that was describing who millionaires are in America. Everyone thinks of the celebrities and high-profile tycoons like CEOs, etc. The article said most millionaires in America are small business owners (your Ford dealership, dry cleaning chains, and real estate agent folks) and they tend to budget, squirrel away money and live less than ostentatious lives. I know some like that. They think nothing of spending $5,000 for rugs on a trip to Mexico, yet they hit the roof when they have to find extra help to cover for an employee on maternity leave.

[TahitiNut]

10. Yep. What's more, they think nothing of 'expensing' such rugs and trips.

I know of this in my own family - more than one. Family cars? Business vehicles. CostCo membership? Business expense. Gasoline? Company credit card. Season tickets to NFL games? Business expense - and family and friends attend games. The list is endless, and regarded as an 'entitlement' because "heavy is the head that wears the crown."

Taxpayer-subsidized recreation. :puke: :puke: :puke: :puke:

[ekelly]

14. Top dogs skimming..........

I was working for a trade-show setup company. We found that our company President was "expensing" everything from family groceries to gas for the family cars to carpet for his living room. We (along with the company accountant) gathered and copied all receipts and other information and turned him into the parent company owner. The parent company owner is a straight-up honest man. Our president was fired within 1 month, and the VP was found to be part of this sham and he was fired as well.
We all kept our jobs....no retribution. In fact we were all rewarded for ferreting out the thieves.
I dont' know the details about what, if anything, was to be repaid by these guys, but they CAN be brought down!

Granted, this was not a huge corp. like Enron, but it's one small win for the little guys.

[TahitiNut]

15. Yes, I had a similar experience with a start-up.

The CEO was skimming - using company resources (and labor) for personal enrichment. The venture people came in and cleaned house - with the 'assistance' of those of us who'd witnessed these excesses. Sadly, prolonged mismanagement and cronyism decimated the company. Silicon Valley is/was overrun with people 100 times more obsessed with making money than making a product. The "greed is good" culture infested the engineering culture and is destroying it. It's a kind of cancer that rapidly becomes incurable - especially with fascists in charge.

[bread_and_roses]

12. Yeah. You have to wonder how their counterparts in '60's paid $7.25

(approx) in today's $s without going under? Always the same arguements: the sky will fall if we pay more.

[TahitiNut]

16. The net Federal Minimum Wage is now at a 56-year-low.

[bread_and_roses]

17. That page, btw, is "experiencing technical difficulties"

at least when I tried to access it a few minutes ago. I tried finding it via the site links, but no luck. It's a good chart; I've seen it before. Funny it's never cited by those apologists for "cheap labor."

[TahitiNut]

18. Just accessed it afresh - it works.

AOL's web space is one of the reasons I keep my AOL account. It's a decent amount of space (100MB, now) and reliably available. (This is the first time I've heard of access problems in years.)

FWIW, I've 'improved' the Minimum Wage chart today. Since Excel graphs are straight-line from point to point, and an increase in the Minimum Wage is immediate (and vertical), I've adjusted the data points to better reflect/portray the saw-tooth effect. So, for each exact date of a minimum wage increase, I've included a data point for the prior day that reflects the last day of the prior minimum. This way, the value deterioration due to CPI (inflation) shows more clearly, as well. I'm also showing it in 2004 dollars rather than 2000 dollars.

[BrklynLiberal]

6. But ALL of this is only as an amendment to the bankruptcy bill!

So what difference does it make if the minimum wage is raised if everyone is going to be in financial hell anyway?


Minimum wage employees working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year,earn $10,700 a year, $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. Since the last increase in 1997, the value has eroded by morethan 15 percent.

[BrklynLiberal]

8. The letter from NOW about Bankruptcy bill and minimum wage amendment

Action Needed:

We need your calls right away to support a REAL minimum wage increase to $7.75 and to oppose Senator Santorum's (R-PA) attempt to abolish the 40-hour work week by adding a bogus "flex time" proposal to his alternative and smaller wage increase.

The Senate is in the middle of debating a "bankruptcy bill," which NOW opposes because it would inflict great hardship on women, especially those trying to collect child support—but Senator Kennedy (D-MA) has promised to attach a minimum wage increase to every bill that comes to the Senate floor, so he is even putting this important initiative on bills he opposes.

Therefore, on Monday, March 7, the Senate will be voting on this minimum wage amendment as part of the bad bankruptcy bill.

Senator Santorum (R-PA) is proposing a substitute to the Kennedy amendment which will only raise the minimum wage to $6.25, but the trade off for this modest increase is a "poison pill" with the bogus title of "flextime" that will abolish the 40-hour work week by allowing employers to deny workers overtime pay unless they work more than 50 hours in a week, or more than 80 hours over a two-week period. Under this scheme, employers could refuse to pay workers up to ten hours of earned overtime pay every two weeks.

There is no time for e-mails or letters. We must call every senator—both their home offices in your state and their Congressional office in Washington, D.C. Please pick up the phone and call your senators now and at least leave a voice mail with your message (if possible, leave your message for the staff person who handles minimum wage and employment issues.

Your Message:

Please support the Kennedy amendment to raise the minimum wage as you vote on S.256, the Bankruptcy Act. Nearly 60% of minimum wage workers are women and this increase is vital to help them and their families survive.

Do not vote for the Santorum proposal that will wreak havoc on the lives of working parents who will be forced to work 50 hour weeks without overtime compensation, causing them late nights and weekend hours away from their families with no recourse.

Finally, please vote against the bankruptcy bill itself, as it would jeopardize hundreds of thousands of women trying to collect child support.


Background:

RAISING THE MINIMUM WAGE IS A MATTER OF FAIRNESS. The number of people in poverty has increased by 4.3 million since President Bush took office. Nearly 36 million people live in poverty, including 13 million children.
Among full-time, year-round workers poverty has doubled since the late 1970s—from about 1.3 million then to more than 2.6 million. An unacceptably low minimum wage is a key
part of the problem.

Minimum wage employees working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year,earn $10,700 a year, $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three. Since the last increase in 1997, the value has eroded by morethan 15 percent.

INCREASING THE WORK WEEK TO 50 HOURS WITHOUT OVERTIME WILL HURT WORKING FAMILIES. Last year, President Bush and the Republican leadership eliminated overtime protections for more than 6 million people. Today, they want to strip away overtime protection from even more workers, by giving employers the right to work their employees longer hours for less pay.

This proposal is not about creating flexibility for workers. Forcing workers to switch to an 80-hour work period will wreak havoc with workers’ schedules, child care obligations and free time with their families. This is the death of the American weekend.

Minimum wage workers—who are mostly women—working 50 hours one week and 30 hours the next for a year could lose nearly $800 of hard-earned overtime pay that year. Median income workers, working identical hours, would take home $3,000 less than they would under the current law.

Many middle-class families rely on overtime earnings for their children’s college tuition, their own retirement, or even to meet their monthly bills. With nearly 8 million Americans out of work, and with so many other families struggling to make ends meet, cutbacks on overtime are an unfair burden that America's workers should not have to bear.

OPPOSE THE BANKRUPTCY BILL. Even as we support the Kennedy minimum wage increase, and need to put pressure on senators to increase the minimum wage, we oppose the bankruptcy bill for many reasons. You can find a summary of the arguments against the bill, as well as a letter from NOW.

Please call your senator today or Monday morning with this important message. Senators who are potential supporters of the Kennedy amendment should be called first:


Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA)
Senator Benjamin Nelson (D-NE)
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
Senator Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Senator Herbert Kohl (D-WI)
Senator John McCain (R-AZ)
Senator John Warner (R-VA)
Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Senator Mike DeWine (R-OH)
Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN)
Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME)
Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK)
Senator Thomas Carper (D-DE)


FIND YOUR SENATORS NUMBERS HERE: www.senate.gov

FIND YOUR HOUSE REP HERE: www.house.gov

[Ripley]

9. Thanks for that post.

Wow, these guys really put the "slave" into "slave wages" don't they?

[EBK]

11. Santorum's proposal

snip-

Santorum's proposal contains an idea that Republicans have advocated, without success, for years: "flex-time," which gives employees the option of shifting their work hours over a two-week period. Supporters say this would allow workers to adjust their schedules to meet family needs


I`m pretty sure a workers family needs is money $$$. California min wage is 6.75 right now. With this state`s cost of living, 6.75 is a drop in the bucket. Most people working a minimum wage job have a hard time paying 2.25 a gal for gas as it is, and by no means can they buy a $472,000 house. But, I guess people who own multiple houses need people to rent to, and people to clean them. This state, as with most of this country, is headed for the crapper. IMO

[hedda_foil]

13. The Dems amendment is a poison pill.

The Repubs will have to vote down the whole bill if it's added. The Santorum amendment is a ploy to make the Dems vote AGAINST an apparent increase in minimum wage, so they'll look like hypocrites. Meanwhile, the bankruptcy bill passes as is. It's a win/win for the pukes.

[Moderator]

19. kick to combine

[madmark]

20. Senate to vote on minimum wage proposals (Its really on the bk law)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate is gearing up for a vote on whether to raise the minimum wage for the first time in eight years as Democrats and Republicans offer competing proposals they want to add to bankruptcy legislation.

Looking ahead to the expected votes Monday evening, the Democratic plan would increase the current $5.15 hourly minimum by more than $2. The GOP proposal couples a more modest raise with a change to the 40-hour work week.

The plan from Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pennsylvania, also includes tax and regulatory breaks for small businesses. His amendment would lift the minimum wage by $1.10 over 18 months, in two steps of 55 cents.

The rival proposal from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, would boost the wage to $7.25 in three increments over 26 months.

The bankruptcy bill, long a priority for Republicans, is intended to make it more difficult for people to eliminate personal debts by declaring bankruptcy.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/05/minimum.wage.ap/index.html

This POS bill is leaving the train station. Are the dems even going to try a filibuster or will they prostrate themselves before MBNA.

[maggiecleveland]

21. crazy...

gonna hurt...

[gizmo1979]

22. If you don't make minumum wage at least 10.00 an hour

why bother.

[seriousstan]

25. Why not $20 an hour. I don't see the reason for a $10 limit.

If $10 is good, wouldn't $20 be even better?

[maggiecleveland]

26. I vote for $20...

heck, that would be $40,000 a year!

[sacxtra]

23. That is because YOU VOTED for SENATORS using THIS

[Itsthetruth]

24. An Excuse

Will some use the minimum wage amendment as an excuse to vote for the bill?

Filibuster! That's what it's for. The Republicans would use it without batting an eyelash.