Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I understand under the rule I have 5 minutes; is that correct?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this is a straightforward amendment that protects the ability of workers to receive their pay, including vacation and sick pay and severance pay, when their company goes bankrupt. Under bankruptcy law, wages owed have long been given an extremely high priority, as they should be. This bill raises the cap on how much pay can be received as a high priority to $10,000. Unfortunately, however, the bill puts a time limit on this of 180 days. In other words, under the bill a worker gets this preference, gets first-in-line priority preference for getting backpay and wages but only for the last 180 days prior to the company filing for bankruptcy. My amendment simply strikes the 180-day limitation. It doesn't touch the $10,000 limit. Why is this important? Many courts have ruled that severance pay is earned during the entire time a worker works for a company. If a worker, let's say, has worked for a company for 10 years and under the contractual agreement gets $500 per year severance pay for every year one worker worked for the company, if this worker has worked for the company for 10 years, this worker is due $5,000 in severance pay. The company goes bankrupt. He gets first in line, he gets his priority, but he can only get it for the last 180 days. So, instead of $5,000, he or she only gets $250. That is grossly unfair. We faced a similar problem with vacation pay. Again, vacation pay has been held to accrue over a certain time period, usually 1 year. So a 1- year time period is when you accrue vacation pay. Let's say, though, that your company goes bankrupt. Let's say you have earned vacation pay for the whole year. Now you only get 180 days' credit, so you are getting about half of what you normally would get. Last, we have the issue of when does the 180-day clock start ticking. A lot of times, a company will file for bankruptcy long after it has closed a division here or a division there or closed an operation someplace and they have laid off people. This happens a lot. Let's say you have worked for a division in Louisiana, and the company, a national company, closed operations in that plant and they just laid you off. They have not gone bankrupt yet; they laid you off. Then 181 days later or 190 days or 200 days later the company files for bankruptcy, OK? Now that worker who worked in that division wants to get priority for back wages. I am sorry, you are out of luck. Why? Because you only get 180 days going back. You may have been laid off, but the company did not go bankrupt, so now you only get to go back 180 days, and they lose their priority. This, again, is grossly unfair. Are there other examples where there is no time period for the collection or for getting into priority preference? I would just mention two. There is a priority for creditors of grain storage facilities. Let's say a farmer has grain in a storage facility. We are familiar with that in Iowa. This has happened many times in the past. Let's say the storage facility goes bankrupt. The farmer gets first-in- line priority to get his pay for the grain stored in that facility. There is no time limit. It could be 2 years, 3 years; there is no time limit whatsoever. But under this bill, for workers, there is a 180-day time limit. For the child support and alimony priority--we have heard a lot of discussion about that--there is no cap and there is no time limit. For farmers on grain elevators there is a cap, but there is no time limit. For child support and alimony there is neither a cap nor a back-time limit. This amendment is very simple. It just says, if you are a worker, if your company goes bankrupt--we leave the $10,000 cap. That is fair. That has been raised from $5,000 to $10,000. It was $5,000 under the old bill. But it does away with the 180-day time limit. It just takes off that time limit and lets workers get in the priority queue to get severance pay, vacation pay, sick pay--their back wages--when and if the company goes bankrupt.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 66 on behalf of myself, Senators Rockefeller, Leahy, Dayton, and Kennedy.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, if there is no one here seeking to speak on the bill, I ask unanimous consent I be allowed to proceed as in morning business for up to 10 minutes.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I rise to congratulate the Governor of California, Governor Schwarzenegger, who just the other day, the day before yesterday, announced his support for a California initiative to get junk food out of our schools. I refer here to a newsclip that came out on Monday. I will read from it. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a longtime advocate of healthier food in schools, said Sunday that all ``junk food'' in vending machines on California campuses should be replaced with nutritious snacks such as fresh vegetables. ``I think we should use our vending machines in the schools--fill them with good food, with fresh vegetables, with milk and products that are really healthy for the body,'' said Schwarzenegger, speaking at the annual fitness exhibition here that bears his name.'' I say: Bravo Governor Schwarzenegger. Thank you. Thank you for taking the lead on this issue. I hope other Governors will follow suit and follow his leadership. I have been concerned about our kids' eating habits for many years now. In the 1996 farm bill, I tried to get vending machines taken out of schools. That didn't quite happen, of course. But we are still making the effort to try to get fresh fruits and vegetables to kids in school for healthier eating. More and more, we see schools making agreements with soft drink companies for exclusive contracts. You walk down the hallways in schools: Coke, Pepsi, this and that, all over the place. Kids are bombarded with this. The fact is, these kids in school are creating for themselves bad habits which, when they go into adulthood, lead to chronic diseases. So we have to start with our kids and start in the schools where vending machines and other sources of junk food have a profoundly negative impact on students' nutrition. A recent study took a group of students who ate only USDA-approved school lunches up through the fourth grade. Then they tracked them into the fifth grade, where they gained access to school vending machines, snack bars, and other food sources. Up to the fourth grade they had only USDA-approved school lunches. In the fifth grade they got to go to vending machines and stuff like that. Guess what the study found. As fifth graders, they consumed 33 percent less fruit, 42 percent fewer vegetables, 35 percent less milk than they did as fourth graders. In addition, they ate 68 percent more deep-fried vegetables--French fries--and drank 62 percent more soft drinks and other sugary beverages. In 1 year, from fourth to fifth grade. Our Nation spends a whopping $1.8 trillion on health care, and 75 percent of that goes to treat chronic diseases. A large share of that is preventable. If we are going to turn this situation around, if we are going to move from a current sick care system to a genuine health care system and emphasize prevention and wellness, then our schools are on the front line, and that is why what Governor Schwarzenegger did is so vitally important. Kids today face a minefield of nutritional risks from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to sleep at night, opportunity after opportunity to eat unhealthy foods. Guess what. They are bombarded with ads all day long. Whether it is on television, signs in their schools, they are bombarded with ads to eat junk food, drink sugary beverages. When was the last time you saw an ad for an apple? When was the last time you saw an ad to eat fresh vegetables? No. You see ads to eat all kinds of junk food every single day. That is what our kids see. Ninety-three percent of our teenagers exceed Government guidelines for consumption of saturated fat. One-quarter of our kids show 5 to 10 early warning signs of heart disease. This is from the CDC. I am not making this up. One-third of today's children will go on to develop diabetes. This is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fifteen percent of America's children and teenagers are overweight. That is 3 times what it was 35 years ago. It is higher than any other industrialized country in the world. We are placing our kids at risk in schools. They are inundated by candy, soft drinks, snacks high in sugar, salt, and fat. And to make matters even worse, physical education is being squeezed out of schools. I saw a recent figure that on average in the United States, grade school kids get less than 1 hour of physical activity in school. We are squeezing physical activities out of school. If they are on the football team or the basketball team, or some other varsity, they are all right. But if they are not up to that standard, what physical activity is there for a kid in school today? Lastly, I have worked on a bipartisan basis with members on the Senate Agriculture Committee and the Appropriations Committee to increase physical activities in school and get funding for fresh fruits and vegetables. We started this in the farm bill. It has been a great success, giving free fresh fruits and vegetables to kids. We found that when you give free fresh fruits and vegetables to kids in school, they eat them, it solves the hunger pain, and they study better. Guess what. They are not putting their money in the vending machines to buy junk food. We have had 3 years of experience. We took four States and 100 schools to test this theory, and every single one of those schools has been a resounding success. Now we are up to 9 States and over 200 schools. It is growing. I again commend Governor Schwarzenegger and hope we can get California to move ahead on that also. The Governor said they were introducing legislation to ban all junk foods in schools. I say, Congratulations, Governor Schwarzenegger. Evidently, this is being written or introduced in California to rid schools of vending machines of sodas, bad foods, and stuff such as that. I again want to congratulate the Governor of California. He also spoke on Sunday about the ``broader need for parents to pay attention to what children eat''--saying ``they shouldn't feed them 1,000-calorie cheeseburgers just to avoid an argument.'' Good for you, Governor. He said: I know it's easy to go in that direction. I know when I come home I don't want to fight at home with my kids about what they should eat. Because there are already fights about their homework and about reading and math. You've got to make an effort. What you give a child or what you put in your body is exactly what we become. So the more garbage you put in there, the more you're going to look like a garbage disposal. Again, I want to take the time to commend the Governor for his leadership on this issue. He is a great example of physical fitness. He is also a great example of endurance and of leadership. I hope the Governor of California will not confine himself on this issue only to California. I hope he will take his message nationwide. I hope the other States and other Governors will follow his lead on what he has done in California. I ask unanimous consent that the articles I read from--one that appeared in the Associated Press and also the Los Angeles Times--be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I commend the Governor of California. I say to him that whatever we can do here on a bipartisan basis to back you up, you have our support and our encouragement. Please take your message nationwide. Don't just keep it in California. I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, this amendment basically protects workers who are able to take a priority preference in back wages, vacation pay, severance pay, and sick pay when a company goes bankrupt. Under the bill, there is a limit of $10,000. That is fine; I do not touch that. This amendment lifts the 180 days. For example, let's say a worker has worked for a company for 10 years and they get $500 a year severance pay. The company goes bankrupt. Normally, you get $5,000, but because of the 180 days, you only get $250 for which you get a priority; otherwise, you get in line with the other creditors. What this does is lift the 180 days. There are other examples. If a farmer today has a warehouse receipt for grain in an elevator, there is no time limit on that. They can go 2, 3, 4 years. For alimony there is no time limit. For child support, there is no time limit. There ought not be an arbitrary time limit for a worker who has backpay, sick pay, or severance pay coming. That is all this amendment does. I cannot believe the House will not send this to the President if we adopt this amendment. Do not even try to sell that to me.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent Lauryn Douglas of my office be granted the privilege of the floor for the duration of today's proceedings.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Again, I urge my colleagues to disavow the Santorum amendment and support the Kennedy amendment. It is the least we can do for the least among us--to raise their minimum wage, give value to their work. This is a values issue. This is at the heart of it. It is an issue of what kind of country we want, what kind of Congress we are, and what kind of Senators we are. With that, I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Chair. Last year, the Bush administration's new rule effectively eliminated overtime pay protection for some 6 million American workers. The Senator from Pennsylvania is opening a second front in the war on the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek. While 1.2 million workers would qualify for the minimum wage increase under the Santorum amendment, another 6.8 million workers would lose their current minimum wage protection. As I said, then we get the 80-hour work period for a 40-hour workweek. This has only one purpose: to allow more employers to avoid paying overtime compensation. In my 30 years in Congress, I don't recall such a bold, brazen assault on the compensation of American workers than what we see in the Santorum amendment. It ought to be called the shock-and-awe amendment. Workers get the shock, and corporate America sits back in awe at the latest gift from the party it financed in the last election. I am proud to stand with Senator Kennedy to raise the minimum wage to $7.25. The present one, at $5.15, is a poverty wage. It doesn't respect the dignity of their work, including the most humble. As Senator Kennedy said, of all the issues we are debating, this is a values issue. Think about this compared to all the things we are doing to help the credit card companies with the bankruptcy bill. Think about that. We are going to stick it to low-income people, hard-working Americans like Ruth Owens and Fatemeh Hosseini, and then we are going to stick it to them again by not allowing them to even have an increase in the minimum wage. I would have hoped that the President would have come and asked for an increase in the minimum wage and got his party in the Congress to work with us to increase it. We have done it under Republican Presidents in the past and Democratic Presidents. I don't know why we cannot do it again. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Washington Post article entitled ``Credit Card Penalties, Fees Bury Debtors'' by Kathleen Day and Caroline E. Mayer, which appeared yesterday, be printed at this point in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I call up amendment No. 66.

Mr. HARKIN. I ask that the pending amendments be set aside so I can offer a germane filed amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield for a unanimous consent request?

Mr. HARKIN. Did I hear the Senator correctly that someone was suggesting the minimum wage is communistic?

Mr. HARKIN. More than 60 years we have had a minimum wage in this country. I don't have the data with me right now, but I have seen the data that indicates when the minimum wage was higher relative to, say, corporate salaries and what CEOs were making, that, in fact, our country enjoyed a higher standard of living. Is it not true that if people are making a more decent minimum wage, it lifts them out of poverty; they are better able to provide food and clothing and shelter for their kids and their family, better able to pay tuition to go to college. It seems to this Senator, and I ask my friend from Massachusetts, under the underlying bill, the bankruptcy bill, we are providing all kinds of support, immunities, coverage, for creditors and especially credit card companies; we are providing them all protection, but now when it comes to providing minimum protection for the lowest income people in this country, we cannot seem to do it. It seems incongruous that we would protect the biggest, but for the smallest we cannot seem to do that.

Mr. HARKIN. Parliamentary inquiry: Who controls the time?

Mr. HARKIN. I will take 12 minutes. Will the Chair please remind the Senator when 10 minutes is used up?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, how much time is left on either side?

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. HARKIN. I appreciate that. Mr. President, with the increase in the unemployment rate that we learned of last Friday, it is clear we are in the midst of a two-tiered economic recovery. We have one recovery for high-income Americans, for people on Wall Street, and we have a very different recovery for people working on Main Street. The Neiman Marcus crowd is popping champagne corks, but it is a very different story for Wal-Mart and K-mart shoppers and for the Americans who work at Wal-Mart and K-mart and in other jobs paying low wages. The number of Americans in poverty has increased by more than 4 million since President Bush took office. Nearly 36 million people live in poverty, 13 million children. Among full-time year-round workers, poverty has doubled since the late 1970s, from about 1.3 million then to 2.6 million now. Every day that the minimum wage is not increased, it continues to lose value and workers fall further and further behind. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's priority is not lifting working Americans out of poverty; its priority is keeping labor costs low for corporate America. But this is not surprising. The President has been quite frank and open about taking care of what he calls his ``base.'' I strongly support Senator Kennedy's amendment to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 in three steps. It is long overdue. It has been 5 years since we last had a vote on the minimum wage, and it has been 8 years since we last voted to raise the minimum wage. To have the same purchasing power it had in 1968, the minimum wage would have to be nearly $8.50 today, not $5.15. Since the last increase in 1997, the value has eroded by more than 15 percent. I noticed that the Senator from Pennsylvania was saying that this would increase the minimum wage by 40 percent. Actually, it is 37 percent that Senator Kennedy's amendment would raise the minimum wage. In three stages, it would increase it by 37 percent. The Senator from Pennsylvania said this was unprecedented. Under Franklin Roosevelt, it went up 53 percent; under Truman, 47 percent. Under Eisenhower, it went up 33 percent. Under the first President Bush, it went up 25 percent. The point is that since 1997, the last time we raised it, the value has eroded by 15 percent. So if we are going to boost it up over the next 3 years and it increases by 37 percent, you are really only going up by 22 percent more than what it was in 1997. I don't think that is an undue burden on business in America. Since 1997, the last time we raised the minimum wage, Members of Congress have raised their own pay seven times in the last 8 years by $28,500. Think about that. We vote to raise our pay seven times in 8 years by $28,500, but for minimum wage workers earning $10,700 a year, we can't vote to raise their minimum wage--shame on the Senate. We have heard in the past that it is mostly teenagers and part-time workers who are working for the minimum wage. That is not the case. The facts are, 35 percent of those earning the minimum wage are the family's sole breadwinners, 61 percent are women, and almost a third of those women are raising children. The Senate Finance Committee may soon be marking up a welfare reauthorization bill. As the Senate contemplates welfare reauthorization, as we address the goal of moving people from welfare to work, it is especially important we act to raise the minimum wage. Since 1996, we reduced the number of welfare cases by half. I was intrigued by the chart the Senator from Pennsylvania put up because many of the people who moved off of welfare did not move out of poverty. Why? Because the minimum wage is not a living wage; it is a poverty wage. But an increase to $7.25, such as Senator Kennedy wants to do, would make a dramatic difference. For a full-time year-round worker, that would add $4,370 in income. That could be a real value to a family living in poverty. For a low-income family of three, let's say one wage earner, single mother, two children, that would be enough money to pay for a year and a half of heat and electricity or a full tuition for a family member pursuing a community college degree. The Senator from Pennsylvania said what really lifts people out of poverty is more work, not raising the minimum wage. I ask: How can a single mother of two working a minimum wage job work more? What is she supposed to do--work 16 hours a day at the minimum wage? How much more can people be expected to work? The amendment of the Senator from Pennsylvania changes the 40-hour workweek to an 80-hour work period over 2 weeks, with the maximum that anyone can work in 1 week of 50 hours. Add it up. It doesn't take a mathematician. Eighty hours for 2 weeks; you can work up to 50 hours in 1 week. So you work 50 hours 1 week, 30 hours the next week. Guess what. You just got cheated out of 10 hours of overtime. Before, you would work 40 hours. If you worked 50, you would get 10 hours of overtime. Now you don't get any overtime. That is what is happening to low-income workers in America today. First of all, we have a bankruptcy bill that slaps them in the face. It makes them pay through the nose. I don't know if anyone read the article in the Washington Post yesterday. I will ask consent to print this article at the conclusion of my remarks. They mention a Ruth Owens in Cleveland who tried for 6 years to pay off a $1,900 balance on her Discover card, sending the credit company a total of $3,492 in monthly payments from 1997 to 2003. Yet her balance grew to $5,564.28 even though she never used the card to buy anything more. So she paid $3,492 on a $1,900 balance, and she still has yet to pay off her balance. They mention another person, a special education teacher, Fatemeh Hosseini, who worked a second job to keep up with the monthly payment she collectively sent to five banks to try to pay $25,000 in credit card debt. Even though she had not used the cards to buy anything more, her debt nearly doubled to $40,574 by the time she filed for bankruptcy last June. That is what is happening to poor people. The credit card companies suck them in with a credit card, go out and charge it up, nice and easy. They find they have a $1,900 bill to pay. They start paying a little bit here and there. They miss a couple of payments. All of a sudden they have $5,564 to pay. Nearly 7.5 million workers would directly benefit from the Kennedy amendment. In Iowa, 87,400 workers would benefit from the increase. That is over 6 percent of Iowa's workforce. The minimum wage needs to be raised to a level that is not a subsistence wage. The way to do that is to raise the minimum wage to a level that respects work, honors it, and rewards work at a reasonable level. Just last week our friends on the other side of the aisle were touting what they called their ``Republican poverty alleviation agenda.'' I say watch what they do, not what they say. The President sent up a budget request replete with cut after cut to antipoverty programs. Now the Senator from Pennsylvania has launched a new attack on the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek. Now the Senator from Pennsylvania says he wants to increase the minimum wage, albeit only $1.10 an hour over the next 2 years, about half of the Kennedy amendment. But again, he guts it by ending the 40-hour workweek and going to this 50-hour max, 80-hour work period over 2 weeks.

Mr. HARKIN. I ask that the amendment be set aside.

Mr. HARKIN. If the Senator would yield, it seems we have settled that issue in this country. Going back how many years now have we had a minimum wage?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. HARKIN. I offer this amendment on behalf of myself, Senators Rockefeller, Leahy, and Dayton, and I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kennedy be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that John Anderson of my staff be granted floor privileges for the duration of today's session.