Increase

Increase

Minimum

Wage

To the Editor:

The present federal minimum wage of $4.25 an hour was set in 1991. Because of inflation, it would take $5.15 an hour today to buy what $4.25 bought in 1991. President Clinton wants to raise it to $5.15 now to make things fair for more than 12 million American workers. Sixty-nine percent of these workers are adults, 59 percent of them women. A full-time worker at $5.15 would earn the poverty level for a family of three.

The last raise passed the Senate 89-8 and the House 382-37. President Bush signed it. A clear majority of •today’s Senate (including eight Republicans) supports Clinton’s bill. Seventy-nine percent of the American people want it. Senator Robert Dole, the Republican leader, refuses to let the Senate vote on it, and it would take 60 votes to force him to do so, not just a majority.

Dole’s own (taxpayer-paid) salary has risen 563 percent during his time in Washington. If the minimum wage had increased at the same rate as his salary, it would be $7.62 an hour. During the time the federal government was shut down because no budget had been adopted. Senator Dole drew more government salary than a full-time minimum-wage worker makes in a year.

Some Republicans say that raising the minimum wage would cost jobs. Opponents have said this every time the rate has been raised (seven times since World War II), but it has never happened. More than 100 noted economists, including three Nobel Prize winners, have endorsed President Clinton’s proposal.

AUGUSTUS C. JOHNSON

Syria

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