This week, the Republican Senate rejected
Senator Kennedy's proposal to raise the federal minimum wage. By a vote of
52-46, Republicans cast their cold-hearted votes to keep the minimum wage at the same rate it has been at for the last nine years.
This letter from a reader in the Sun-Sentinel pretty much sums up the issue:
Sen. Mel Martínez should try to live on $10,712 per year ($5.15 an hour). Clearly, based on his recent vote not to raise the minimum wage, he feels that Americans earning that amount can sustain themselves.
He can say it is to help business or to protect jobs, but he has once again stuck it to working Americans who will live below the poverty level working full time at that wage. Why ask business to pay a fair wage when he can burden the American working family already crushed under the national debt?
Thank you, Sen. Martínez, for keeping an affordable home out of the grasp of working Americans. His anti-family vote not to raise the federal minimum wage while he accepts a raise is the height of hypocrisy.
Whatever he got for his soul, he should donate it to a family trying to survive at $5.15 an hour. For his sake, I hope that he has enough wealthy constituents to support his next campaign, but I doubt it. Shame on him.
Hard-working Americans who get paid the minimum wage don't get the luxury of automatic pay raises, like members of Congress do. For the record, just this month, Congress went ahead and agreed to keep that automatic salary increase.
Every single Democrat present voted for the minimum wage increase. The only Republicans to join Democrats and side with the American worker were Senators Chafee, Lugar, Snowe, Specter, and Warner (and Jeffords as well).
[Update:] I forgot to include Senators Collins and DeWine, who also voted with the Democrats on this issue.