National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007
NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2007 -- (Senate - June 21, 2006)
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Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I yield myself 10 minutes.
I have listened patiently through 4 hours yesterday and quite a bit of time this morning. There are some things that need to be said.
I appreciate the comments from our side of the aisle and from everybody who has gone before me. I particularly appreciate the comments of the Senator from Georgia because some of those things have been grating on us a little bit as we have listened to what has been said. We have seen the charts which show that small businesses in this country are in favor of that kind of a tax increase.
I spoke to the Federation of Independent Businesses yesterday morning. They do the most complete job of surveying their members than any association that I know of. They do not back anything unless there is a strong consensus by their members.
They are opposed, by their vote, to the minimum wage increase that Senator Kennedy is suggesting.
I do not know where they find that 86 percent. But I have seen surveys before that are able to manufacture the kinds of numbers that people want to have.
From the manufacturing members, I suggest that it sounds reasonable to people.
I saw a chart over here last night that showed the average CEO in America is making $11.8 million compared to what a minimum wage person is making.
That is an average CEO. What do you suppose the good ones are making? Eleven million eight hundred thousand dollars a year for the average CEO in this country? I think that must be the average CEO in the top 100 companies in the world. But that is apples and oranges when you are talking about the minimum wage.
We have heard some pretty big numbers about how many people are in poverty and under the minimum wage.
The purpose is to take the 1.9 million people who are at the minimum wage and get them higher wages. We all agree on that. What we don't agree on is how to do that.
The Senator from Massachusetts earlier today said minimum wage jobs don't get you out of poverty; that they keep you in poverty.
That was his quote this morning. I absolutely agree with that.
What we need to do is get higher skills in this country. We need to reduce the number of dropouts in this country. It is dropouts who are working at the minimum wage. It is people who have made some choices that put them in a position where they have to take the lower paying jobs. We need to change that.
When I first came to Washington, welfare reform was going into effect. The newspapers were full of stories that on the day that went into effect, people were going to drop through the cracks. It was going to be this tragedy for American people. After it happened, there were not many stories on that. That is because the tragedies did not happen. People improved their lot in life with jobs.
I happened to be in an ice cream shop where they shared the tables fairly closely. This was fine, but it made it impossible for me not to hear the conversation at the table abutted up to my table. It was a woman and her husband talking to a sister who had a child with her. She was talking about the change that welfare reform had made in her life because she had gotten some additional training, she had gotten a good job, and she was so pleased with her job she was going to shift some hours so she could be at work when her sister was in training. She would take care of that child who was sitting there so her sister could have the same kind of benefit she had.
That is the way we change America. We get people better jobs. We take care of things so people can get better training.
Better training reminds me of the Workforce Investment Act. I have been trying to get the Workforce Investment Act through this process for 3 years now. That is a bill that would train 900,000 people a year to higher paying jobs. That is what we want, higher paying jobs. Do you think we have been able to get it through the process? No. For 2 years we were not able to get a conference committee. Now we are being blocked from having it brought to the Senate for debate. That would solve a lot of the problems.
We talk about the difference in wages between men and women. We had a great hearing in our Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. I liked one of the people whom Senator Kennedy selected to give testimony, a lady from New York City. She was talking about the value of taking nontraditional jobs. She happened to be a stone mason, a person who works with bricks, rock, and marble. She makes things beautiful. She started with basic construction, and she worked her way up to where she was hanging marble on skyscrapers. She shared with us the progression in pay she had gotten. She is making more than I am. She made that progression rather rapidly, but she had to take a job that was nontraditional for women. She wears a hard hat and safety toes and goes up skyscrapers. You do not necessarily have to do that to make more money.
I always point out in Wyoming we have a shortage of people to work. That shortage is providing power for this country. Over a third of the coal that is mined in this country is mined in Campbell County, WY, which is where Gillette is. That is where I am from. Their problem now is getting people to drive haul trucks. They are big trucks. Two of them would not fit in this Chamber. They would be as high as the ceiling. They are big equipment. They have power steering, power brakes, enclosed cabs with air conditioning. They drive almost like a car. If a person can drive and pass a drug test, they can start at $60,000 a year and get the training to work on that truck. That is way above minimum wage, folks. That is $60,000 a year. If they want to put in some overtime--they would not be allowed flextime at the present time--they can make more than that.
We need to have people look at some of the nontraditional jobs and look at some of the other areas of the country. If they are in an area with a lot of people and not many jobs, they will have lower paying jobs. We need to get more job training. We need to have the people be where the good-paying jobs are. They would find pretty good quality of life, too.
I need to correct a couple of other things. First of all, we make some of these charts sound as if everyone working at minimum wage is a single mom with lots of kids. That does not fit with the statistics. There are 1.9 million people at the minimum wage. Fully 85 percent of the minimum wage earners live with their parents--I would think most of the parents hope that means they are teenagers--or they have a working spouse or are living alone without children. So 41 percent live with a parent or relative, 23 percent are single or are the sole breadwinner in a household with no children, and 21 percent live with another wage earner. A lot of those are teenagers. Yes, they are in poverty if that is all they are making.
I have had some minimum wage jobs. I don't know how many in this Chamber have had minimum wage jobs. I worked in the summers and while I was going to college, even when I was considerably younger than that. One of the things I discovered was if I was interested in what I was doing and I learned as much as I could about it, I was not at the minimum wage very long. I got a promotion. I got more pay. But of course the reason I got more pay is because I was able to do more things. I was more skilled. Minimum wage equals minimum skills.
McDonald's takes a real rap for starting people at minimum wage, and I have a friend named Jack Preiss who owns several McDonald's. He pointed out to me he has three of his employees who started at minimum wage who now own 20 McDonald's.
That is the way we want America to work. We do not want minimum wage jobs that don't get you out of poverty. They keep you in poverty. Yes, we want higher skills, better jobs, and the opportunity for people to have higher wages. If people are locked into the fact they are going to have a minimum wage job their whole life, they are going to have a minimum wage job their whole life. But there are options. There are opportunities out there. And there could be more if we could do the Workforce Investment Act.
Flextime is one of six provisions in this bill that make a difference to small business.
I reserve the remainder of my time.
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Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I yield myself 4 additional minutes.
The Senator from Massachusetts has said: Let's have an up-or-down vote. There are a lot of things around here that we talk about having an up-or-down vote on. We have not been able to have up-or-down votes, and it is always because there are some other amendments that might make the bill better. Sometimes they are even germane to the bill we are talking about.
The one we are talking about, the amendment we are putting this on now is Department of Defense. Yes, you can make some arguments about how this is defense related, I guess, but what we would normally do, if we were serious on an issue such as this, is bring it up as a separate issue and allow amendments to it. But that is not going to happen because there are a few things in my bill that the other side of the aisle would not like to have.
One of those is flextime. They show that chart where the person could make 50 hours this one week and get overtime and then make 30 hours in the next week. That is not how the real world works either. They would earn 40 hours in one week, which would not be overtime, and 40 hours in the next week, which would not be overtime. That is still the same 80 hours. With the agreement of the person asking for the flextime, they could put the 50 hours in one week, the 30 hours in the other week, have the extra day to do whatever they want with their kids.
If flextime is a bad idea, why did we let the Federal employees do it? The problem in my State is with the person who works for a private industry in Wyoming who is married to someone who works for the Federal Government because the Federal Government lets them do the flextime that the Senator from Massachusetts says steals overtime. If it stole overtime, does anyone think our Federal employees would be interested in it? No; they have other values.
When we did flextime for the Federal Government, Senator Kennedy voted to ensure that the Federal employees would have access to flextime, to have the scheduling options necessary to balance work and family life. Senator Kennedy, along with 11 other Democrats, cosponsored the Nickles bill that extended flextime and comp time to State and local employees. If it is a bad idea, why would they do it for Federal employees and State and local employees? And why don't we do it for the private employees? The argument is, nasty employers would never let them have the time.
That is a terrible rap for business. Small business understands the needs of their people better than big business because they work with them every day, they go to church with them every weekend, they are in civic organizations with them, their kids go to the same schools, and they are the ones who have to deliver the bad news that they are not going to be allowed to do that flextime, and they cannot afford to do it a different way.
Sometimes the employees in small business make more than the employers in small business. Those are some of the CEOs whom I am worried about, the ones who have to wake up in the middle of the night and say, How am I going to make payroll this week?
I would like to be paying my people more, but I don't know how I am going to pay them at all.
That is a reality in small business. I know small businessmen across the country who are hearing me say that are saying: He's got it. He understands our problem. What can you do to help us?
So we put together some provisions that in a normal situation we would be able to debate one of those at a time and decide on some of them and reject some of them. That is how it ought to work. But it is not just as simple as saying we can get everybody and all the kids out of poverty if we were just to raise the minimum wage.
Mr. President, I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of my time.
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