UAW NLRB Election at Cattanooga Volkswagen Plant

Floor Speech

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Mr. CARTWRIGHT. Thank you, Mr. Pocan.

I want to say, at the outset, that I was impressed with the colloquy that you had with our colleague from California (Mr. George Miller), and I wish to associate myself with those comments. They were very well-taken.

I, for one, and I know I speak on behalf of the entire Congressional Progressive Caucus, but I, for one, hope that the National Labor Relations Board revisits what happened in Chattanooga, because what we believe here in America is free and fair elections, and that includes labor union elections as well.

We are here to talk about raising the minimum wage, and it was only appropriate that Mr. Miller from California was here with us this evening because he is one of the coauthors of H.R. 1010, the bill to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, a modest proposal, I should add.

But let me attempt to address this House. I know that there are those who think that everything that could be said about raising the minimum wage has already been said, but allow me to address this House as if nothing had been said about raising the minimum wage in this country to $10.10.

It is simply a matter of arithmetic. You know, if you just take what people were making at a minimum wage in the late 1960s in this country and put it on a cost index, a consumer price index, any kind of measure of inflation that has gone on since 1968, you see that, as my colleague and good friend from Wisconsin mentioned, it is well over $10.10 an hour. It is something like $10.60 an hour.

So this is indeed a modest proposal to turn the minimum wage up from the mid-sevens to $10.10 an hour, and there are good, solid reasons we have in this country for doing this.

My fellow Members of the House, you have to remember what life is like for people who are making $7.25, $7.50, $7.75. People who are in that range are not bringing home enough money to make a living wage. They don't have enough money for the necessities of life.

People who are working full time--you have heard the expression ``the working poor,'' that is who we are talking about. These are the working poor.

Think about what our society has to do for the working poor. These are the people who have to take advantage of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the SNAP benefits. They used to be called food stamps.

These people don't make enough money, even though they work full time, to feed their families properly, so they resort to help from the SNAP program. Who pays for the SNAP program you might ask?

All of us do. U.S. taxpayers, John Q. Public pays for the SNAP program, so it is John Q. Public, not the employers of these people making the $7 per hour, not the employers paying for that, it is John Q. Taxpayer picking up the difference.

It is the taxpayers paying for the SNAP benefits for the workers who, although they are working full time, their employers are not paying them enough so that they can feed their families, give them the very basic necessities.

What else?

These are people that live in section 8 housing, low-income housing. Everybody knows that, the projects. That is where they live, the people who make minimum wage right now and try to feed and clothe and shelter their families on minimum wage in this country.

So who pays the supplemental amount to keep the section 8 housing program going?

It is us. It is John Q. Public, John Q. Taxpayer.

It is the American taxpayers picking up the difference because not enough is being paid to these workers so that they can sustain their families. But that is not all.

What about Head Start?

These are families that can't afford to send their kids to preschool because when they are making minimum wage, they can't pay the minimal fee to send your kid to preschool.

So where do they go?

They go to Head Start. Head Start, a federally funded program.

Who pays for that?

You already know the answer. You do. It is the American taxpayer. It is John Q. Public paying for Head Start because we have got working families that don't make enough even to send their little kids to preschool.

What is the point of all of this?

The point is that these employers paying the minimum wage to these workers are paying so little that the American taxpayers have to step in and improve the lives of these people to such a basic level that they can feed them and clothe them and shelter them and give them the basic elemental education.

In other words, these employers are freeloaders. They are getting a free ride off of the American public because they are paying the minimum wage, which is in the sevens and it should be in the tens.

Listening to this debate, the owner of a small business might say, well, wait a minute. That means I have to lay people off because I only have so much money to pay my employees, so if you up the minimum wage to $10.10, I don't have as much money to pay each person, so I have to lay somebody off so I can pay the remaining people the $10.10 an hour.

That is a fallacy. It is a completely bogus argument, and let me tell you why: because that assumes that your business is a zero sum game. It is not.

To prove that, we need go back a century to a great American businessman, a self-made man, Henry Ford out of Dearborn, Michigan. What did he do?

He started one the greatest auto companies in the world. A central tenet of his business principles was that he was going to pay his workers a living wage, and he did.

They asked him, Mr. Ford, why are you paying your workers so much? You don't have to do this.

The answer is: I want my workers to be able to afford the things that I am building. If these people can't afford what I am building, then I don't have a market.

That is where the magic word comes in: customers. If you pay $10.10 to your employees, it is not just your employees getting that increase in wages, it is everybody else's employees. Everybody in America, instead of making in the sevens, they get up to $10.10, and all of a sudden they have a few more coins jingling in their pockets, and they might show up in your place of business.

You are making customers out of millions and millions and millions of Americans by paying them a working wage, a living wage, a wage that will enable them to become your customers.

So don't write off this argument, and don't fall for the same old argument that has been used, trotted out time and time again for why we shouldn't raise the minimum wage. If we here in America had believed and followed that argument, the minimum wage would still be $2.25 instead of what it is now.

So think of the customers you will get. This is why raising the minimum wage just to what we would raise it to to account for inflation since 1968 makes sense.

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Mr. CARTWRIGHT. If stacked end to end, how far into space would those sofas reach is the question.

It is a great point, Mr. Pocan. Of course, you know the answer. The answer is this: when we put that extra money in the pockets of the people who are making the minimum wage in this country, they don't put that money in their brokerage accounts just to languish and not help others in the economy. They plug that money right back into the American economy, and it turns into growth and it turns into jobs.

That is what we were doing in 1968 when our economy was humming along and we were the pride of the free world. That is what we need to do again.

We need to think about stimulating our economy the old fashioned American way, by paying American workers a living wage.

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