Within a week, Congress denied workers a small increase in minimum wage, which has stagnated for nine years, and gave themselves a salary hike of $3,300 a year.
On June 21, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on raising the minimum wage from its current rate of $5.15 an hour to $7.25 an hour by 2009. Two days later, Congress awarded itself a salary increase for the ninth time since 1997.
The pay raise also applies to the vice president—who is president of the Senate—congressional leaders, and Supreme Court justices.
This year, Vice President Dick Cheney, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, and Chief Justice John Roberts receive $212,100. Associate justices receive $203,000. House and Senate party leaders get $183,500. President Bush, whose salary is not tied to this most recent Congressional pay increase, gets $400,000. In contrast, a full-time worker who gets the federal minimum wage barely makes $10,500.
The arguments in Congress against the increase are weak statements dripping with hypocrisy. Some senators even proclaimed that blocking the vote for a minimal increase was in the best interest of the workers because of potential job losses. The facts speak differently. In the four years after the last minimum wage increase in 1996-97, 11 million new jobs were added, including 600,000 restaurants jobs.
But even these weak arguments, and all arguments like it, are a cover for what is actually part and parcel of the capitalist system in which the rapacious drive for profit displaces the needs of the majority of people—the working class.
Not one member of Congress belongs to the working class.
In fact, the members of Congress are all representatives of the capitalist class, which constantly attempts to steal more from the workers in order to beef-up their profits and those of their class. Keeping the minimum wage at unbelievably low levels is just one of the many ways that the capitalist class and its representatives exploit the workers for their own benefit.
Minimum wage not enough
The minimum wage is not enough for working people to survive on. A single mother with two small children living in Philadelphia and earning $8.00 an hour would still be at the official poverty level, and that’s nearly $3.00 more than the current federal minimum wage. The National Center for Children in Poverty’s Family Resource Simulator reveals that that same mother would need to earn $40,600 a year to survive. With the incredibly low minimum wage levels, that mother would need to work in excess of 150 hours a week without any vacation to earn the required salary. (Ascribe Newswire, June 20, 2006)
Workers produce all the wealth in society, yet they live in conditions of poverty. Around 37 million Americans—12.7 percent of the population—officially live in poverty. Many of the people living in poverty are working one or two jobs. And 45.8 million Americans lack health insurance.
The minimum wage, even if raised to $7.25 an hour, is really legally encoded theft by the capitalist bosses. A full-time minimum wage worker now makes just $10,712 per year. In 2006 real dollars, this represents wages lower than what the minimum wage provided 40 years ago. (Economic Policy Institute, Minimum Wage Issue Guide, July 2006)
Yet, the capitalist class and their Congressional representatives—who do not carry out any productive work—enrich themselves by exploiting the working class. Wal-Mart’s CEO makes $12,000 an hour—2,330 times the salary of a Wal-Mart cashier. The Walton family, which controls 30 percent of Wal-Mart stock, is worth $90 billion dollars.
The increase in the minimum wage, had it been passed by Congress, would have been an insufficient but still helpful increase for working people who are constantly struggling to make ends meet. And our class should continue to fight for an increase in wages, for health care, for better pensions, and for all of our rights as workers. Congress is surely not going to hand them over without a fight.
As revolutionary socialists, our struggle is to link these struggles for basic rights to the overall struggle for socialism. Capitalism can’t work for the working class. It denies workers the right to live, while further enriching a small minority of owners that do no real work.
