Doing the minimum.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Even though the U.S. Senate is accurately referred to as the "Millionaires Club," that hasn't stopped senators from giving themselves raises totaling $30,000 over the past nine years. In the House, representatives have pocketed automatic raises of $3,300 a year for seven consecutive years.

These well-heeled elected officials rarely miss an opportunity to hike their own pay, but they're stone-hearted cheapskates when it comes to their constituents at the bottom end of the economic ladder - people who work for the federal minimum wage.

The Republican-controlled Congress has not raised the federal minimum wage in almost nine years, despite overwhelming public support for an increase. The current minimum has languished at $5.15 an hour since September 1997, meaning those hardy souls who clean offices, flip burgers and wash cars have been unable to earn more than $10,712 a year.

They'll only get that if they work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year without taking a day off - not a single day - to do something like recover from illness, attend a funeral or care for a sick child.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to increase the minimum wage by $2.10 over two years drew the support last week of 52 senators, including eight Repub- licans.

Although a majority voted for the increase, 60 votes were needed under Senate budget rules to pass such legislation.

The situation in the House bordered on despicable. Republican leaders refused to let a minimum wage increase come to a vote, apparently because it would pass.

Republicans must be worried that any increase would offend the chief executive officers who don't want to see any slippage in their compensation ratio with minimum wage workers.

Right now, an average CEO makes 821 times as much as someone who earns $5.15 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute. An average CEO earns more before lunchtime on the very first day of work in the year than a minimum wage worker earns all year.

The earnings gap hasn't always been so wide. As recently as 1978, CEOs were paid only 78 times as much as minimum wage earners. If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay over the past 15 years, fast-food restaurants would now be paying workers $23.03 per hour.

Oregonians can take pride in the fact that they refused to let the misers in Congress have the last word on state wages. At $7.50 an hour, Oregon's minimum wage is the second-highest in the nation, and it is indexed to keep pace with rising prices.

None of the apocalyptic scenarios promoted by the restaurant industry and other opponents of raising the minimum wage have come to pass in Oregon. In fact, the opposite has occurred.

The state's restaurant industry is thriving, and the National Restaurant Association projects that Oregon restaurant employment will grow 14.5 percent in the next decade.

Not only that, despite having the nation's second-highest minimum wage, Oregon's unemployment rate has dropped in the past three years from a national high of 8.5 percent to the current 5.6 percent. Washington and California, which both have state minimum wages that are well above the federal level, have experienced similar employment growth. So much for the alleged job losses that are supposed to accompany a higher minimum wage.

For millions of low-wage workers - especially women, minorities and the least-educated - the minimum wage affects not just their current earnings, but also their lifetime earnings potential. It's long past time for Congress to join Oregon and 16 other states that have recognized the importance of raising the minimum wage above $5.15 an hour.

As stagnation in the federal minimum wage threatens to set a record, voters should remember that this stinginess has been orchestrated by a Republican-controlled Congress. That's why elections are important. There's one coming up in November.