George Miller

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/4\ minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Linda T. Sanchez).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Mrs. Capps).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 1 minute. Mr. Speaker, it is rather interesting that speaker after speaker gets up on the other side of the floor and in spite of the economic evidence of how well those States that have raised their minimum wages are doing compared in terms of job creation and economic growth to those States that kept the minimum wage low; it is rather compelling and overwhelming evidence in terms of higher job growth and higher economic growth, significantly higher even in the retail professions in those States that increased the minimum wage. It is also rather interesting in light of the fact that the Gallup Poll of small business owners in March of last year said the overwhelming majority of small business owners, 86 percent, say the minimum wage had no impact on them. Nearly half the small business owners, 46 percent, supported the increase in the minimum wage. It is an interesting dynamic you are talking about, but it is almost 20 years out of date in terms of the economics, what is taking place, as States have continued to raise the minimum wage, and the economic growth that has followed the wage increases that have followed, the growth and retail, which is very difficult in a competitive area, and the job growth that was created in those areas because people had money to put into the economy. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Maine (Mr. Michaud).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Connecticut (Ms. DeLauro).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia (Ms. Norton).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Becerra).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pascrell).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Lynch).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Honda).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Rush).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis). (Mr. DAVIS of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Corrine Brown).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Al Green) who has been a long-time advocate of the increase in the minimum wage, both in this Congress and before he came to this Congress.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking the staff of the Education and Labor Committee, Jody Calemine and Michele Varnhagen, for all of their work on this legislation. They have diligently worked for years to get this day to come before the House of Representatives, and I know they have the appreciation of all of the members of our committee. I also want to thank our newer staff members, Megan O'Reilly, Brian Kennedy and Michael Gaffin, for their good work today and all of their efforts on behalf of this legislation, preparing it for the floor. I also want to thank my colleagues on this side of the aisle who argued on behalf of this bill to increase the minimum wage, and I want to thank my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who said that they were going to support this measure. They may not fully agree with it, but they said they would support it. And I want to thank the cosponsors of this legislation, including I believe seven Republicans who were original cosponsors of this legislation and over 193 Democrats on this side of the aisle. I was especially taken with the remarks of my colleagues on this side of the aisle who understand that this debate is about more than dollars and cents per hour. This is about the values of this Nation. It is about the value we place on work. It is about the statement that we make to people who go to work every day and work terribly hard in very difficult jobs that most people in this country would prefer not to have. But they go to work every day to do that, to provide for themselves, to provide for their children or to provide for their families. When you talk to minimum wage workers, whether they are providing for themselves or themselves and a child or a child and a spouse, it is tough. It is tough. As the gentleman said on the front page of The Washington Post today, ``When I get all done, I have nothing left for me,'' because he is also taking care of his parents as he is earning the minimum wage. So this is a big day. This is a big day because this is the first time in 10 years that the Congress signals that in fact we are going to raise the minimum wage. It is what our leader, Speaker Pelosi, said she wanted to do in this first 100 hours. In this first 100 hours she wanted to address urgent parts of the national agenda that are of deep concern to the American people. And to over 80 percent of the American people in this country, they understand that the increase in the Federal minimum wage is a matter of morality, it is a matter of their values, it is a matter of the reflection of our Nation. They understand that these people, minimum wage workers in this country, have been working at a wage that is 10 years old. Ten years old. And they understand the unfairness of that, and they understand the difficulty of that. That is why we brought this bill as a clean bill, because we wanted to highlight and to speak to the Nation about this group of workers who are toiling in spite of the fact that in 28 States they have raised the minimum wage at or above the levels we are talking about. In spite of that fact there are still some 13 million people who are directly impacted by the actions we take here today and the actions we take later on to send this bill to the President of the United States. There are 13 million people whose economic viability is dependent upon this bill to increase the minimum wage. That is why we have to do this, and that is why I am so terribly proud of the Members who stood up today and argued for this increase in the minimum wage. Mr. Speaker, I will reserve 5 minutes of my time, yield 1 minute to the gentleman from California (Mr. McKeon) so he may have a similar amount of time, and yield back the balance of my time over the 5 minutes.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I want to begin by commending you for the job you did in the chair today and the manner in which you conducted the debate on this issue; and I appreciate the professionalism with which you handled the gavel. Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, I want to thank all of our colleagues who participated in the debate today. We have our differences of opinions, but I thought that the debate was well conducted. We have waited for over 10 years to have this vote on the minimum wage, a clean vote on the minimum wage for the poorest workers in this country who have worked at a wage that is 10 years old. You know, very often Members of Congress will take the floor and they will harken back to the time in their youth when they worked at the minimum wage and they will talk about the different jobs they had. Well, let me share with you that I, too, share those experiences. I cleaned out oil tanks; I cleaned out ships; I drove trucks in the pear orchards; I picked fruit; I worked in the canneries; and sometimes I did two of those at the same time. I worked at night in the cannery and in the daytime in the oil refinery. I worked at the minimum wage. I wonder how I would have felt about that minimum wage if it had been 10 years old. If I was working at the minimum wage and my wages were 10 years into the past and everybody else working around me had current wages, I wonder how angry I would have been if I would have had to support a family--at one point I was supporting a family with those minimum wage jobs--I would have been very angry. I would have thought this was a very unfair system, that my wages were stuck 10 years in the past and everybody else's wages were current. Well, that is what has happened to these workers up until today. Today, we finally release them from being frozen in time, where their wages are from 10 years ago, but when they go to the supermarket, the food prices are higher; when they put gasoline in the car, the gasoline prices are higher; when they pay the utility bills, the utility bills are higher; when their kids get sick, the medical bills are higher. All of those things are higher. They are living in 2007, but in their wages they are living in 1997. There is something terribly, terribly wrong with that picture. That is why overwhelmingly throughout the country the people support this effort now to raise the minimum wage. Eighty-nine percent of the people believe that we should do this, and they basically believe it as a matter of economic fairness, of economic justice to these people who are working so hard at minimum wage, who, as we say over and over again, but remember what they are, they are the poorest paid workers in America today. And when they turn on the TV, when they watch it on their lunch break, they see a CEO walk away with $210 million and a golden handshake after that CEO took a good corporation and ran it into the ditch. They see people backdating stock options, they see people defrauding the corporation for extra compensation, and yet their wages are back in time. This is a question of economic fairness that the American public overwhelmingly responded to in this past election; and it is this issue of economic fairness that our new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said would be the subject of this hundred hours, that we would begin by trying to make America a fairer place for those who go to work and for those who try to provide for their families. We would make America a fairer place and we would begin by increasing the minimum wage, and that is what we are going to do in the next few minutes, when we receive a strong and a bipartisan vote to increase the minimum wage for these workers. It is terribly important that we do this. It says something about us as a Nation. When it is questioned all over the world about the economic disparities in American society, the unfairness of it, we get a chance to begin that process to change that dynamic. I think this is a wonderful moment for the House of Representatives, no matter what side of the aisle you sit on. We, the people's House, are going to address the needs of the people that we were elected to serve. They grant us, they grant us the authority and the ability and the honor to come to the Congress of the United States; and today, and today we are going to address their needs. Today, we are going to address the needs that have concerned them in their communities. If I have any time left, I want to thank the new majority leader for his efforts over these 10 years to try to bring this vote to the floor when time and time again he made that effort in the Appropriations Committee.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I yield to the gentleman from Maryland.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I make a point of order against the motion to recommit. The motion is not germane. For example, the motion contains tax provisions which are clearly outside the jurisdiction of the bill.