Word: waging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HERE'S a prediction: the first legislative defeat that the new Congress will deal to President-elect George Bush will be an increase in the national minimum wage. Ronald Reagan successfully fought attempts to raise the wage floor, which has languished at $3.35 per hour since 1981, but Bush will not be able to resist the tide...
...minimum wage bill currently before the Congress is sponsored by Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D--Cal.) and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D--Mass.), a staunch labor supporter and the chair of the Senate labor committee. It would increase the wage incrementally for three years, peaking at $4.65 in 1991, and would afterwards peg the minimum wage at half of the national average wage...
...case for increasing the wage now is strong. never in its 50-year history has the minimum wage remained so long at one level. Since the last increase, the buying power of the minimum wage has declined 20 percent, from $3.35 to $2.68 in 1981 dollars. The minimum wage has sunk to its lowest real level since 1955, and a full-time minimum wage job no longer keeps a family with one child out of poverty...
ALTHOUGH an increase is long overdue, conservatives remain implacably opposed to the Kennedy-Hawkins bill. They trot out tired, flimsy excuses, including some that were used to oppose the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established the original minimum wage...
...most common of these is the contention that increasing the minimum wage will throw people out of work. Everyone remembers the graph from Ec. 10 that shows how raising wages above the market level causes firms to hire fewer workers. Sounds simple and convincing...