WASHINGTON — President Bush and Congress are locked in a heated battle over how much to raise the federal minimum wage, but Alice Sparks, a Ventura, Calif., cafeteria worker, isn't even paying attention.
Sparks, 62, notes that "almost everyone" at the county-operated snack bar where she works is already earning at least $4.50 an hour anyway--a full $1.15 an hour more than the present federal minimum wage and 25 cents over what Bush is proposing for 1991. Still, she says, "they ought to raise the minimum some. A person just can't live on that these days."
Sparks' assessment underscores the stark difference between the rhetoric and the reality of the current debate. The effort to drive up the minimum wage has taken on a symbolic significance that has overtaken the likely real-world impact in Ventura and across the nation.
Backed by Labor
So important is the symbolism that congressional Democrats, backed by organized labor, are trying hard to push the minimum up from $3.35 an hour, where it has held since 1981, to $4.65 in three annual stages by 1991.
"Allowing such a drastic erosion has broken the 50-year-old promise we have made to the American worker that the minimum wage should be a living wage," asserts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.
Republicans, citing the concerns of small businesses, argue that any increase should be modest, lest it raise business costs so sharply that it would discourage firms from hiring more low-level workers. They also warn that businesses would inevitably pass a higher minimum wage on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
But President Bush, recognizing the pressure for raising the minimum wage, supports an increase in three annual steps to $4.25 an hour. He would combine it with a new "training minimum" that would allow employers to continue to pay workers the current $3.35-an-hour minimum wage for their first six months on the job.
"It's the only effective way to offset the job loss," says Labor Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole.
Little Difference
The evidence shows, to the contrary, that neither proposal would make any appreciable difference, either for the work force as a whole or for the businesses that have to pay the extra wages.
