![]() We should continually look to review how people are having to juggle so many things in this hard economic time. It's been the norm, and it's - and that's not where it should be. So what we thought many years ago, minimum wage was just the bottom foundation to get people going has been the norm. Many are women, single head of households that are working and holding down two minimum-wage jobs, and many minimum-wage workers work 40 hours a week. So they're not just high school kids and the myth that they're college students. I would say a good, maybe, 40, 50 percent of that population is over 20. What usually happens is the person that typically benefits from the minimum wage is someone over the age of 20. ![]() I think it's unfortunate, of course, that we're in this hard economic situation, but I don't think that people necessarily will be turned away from the jobs that they currently have. This was a law that was passed that I got to vote on as a member of the House, and it was signed into law by President Bush. It's $7.25, right? I would say to you that business owners knew this was coming. SOLIS: It's only been a month or so that it was increased. What's been the effect, as far as you can tell, of the rise in the minimum wage? The people who earn this money will spend it. Other people say wait a minute, this is going to be injecting more money into the economy. We're going to have to lay people off because we're going to have to pay them more. And as ever, the debate about that is always businesses, small businesses say we won't hire people. I'm honored.ĬONAN: Including another rise in the minimum wage. I think there's still a lot that we can do, and the president has given me the opportunity to work with him and institute and implement some of these plans that I fought for even as a House member, as recently as a House member just a few years ago - a few months ago. And since then, I mean, it's just been a part of what I believe in, that, you know, we should be able to level the playing field for working-class people, especially in these hard times, hard economic times where many, many people have lost their manufacturing jobs.Ī lot of those jobs have left the country and gone offshore. I think after we got that passed back in 1996, then other states followed suit, as well. ![]() That's been my background, and working very closely on issues that will affect the largest number of people, one of which was minimum wage and leveling a statewide initiative to get that passed in California - quite remarkable. SOLIS: Well, you know, it is a challenge, but it - I look, in retrospect, at where I started in my public life in terms of working on behalf of working-class people, middle-class people, and I think about my days in the Assembly in California in 1992 and then serving in the Senate in '94, and was always very, very much akin to what was happening with working-class people, especially people in blue-collar jobs. Secretary HILDA SOLIS (Department of Labor): Great to be here.ĬONAN: When you were appointed by President Obama, you knew that unemployment was bad and getting worse, and that this recession was going to be deeper and longer than we had feared initially. The address again is first, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis joins us here in Studio 3A, and thanks very much for coming in today. Later in the program, amid reports that as much as half the population could be affected by swine flu and that 90,000 might die, questions and answers about the new H1N1 virus. Email us: You can also join the conversation on our Web site. If you have questions on those or other issues for the United States secretary of labor, our phone number is 80. Where are all those green jobs we heard so much about during the election? Why hasn't stimulus spending stopped the rise in unemployment? Will the Obama administration push through the so-called card-check legislation to make union organizing easier? Will OSHA and the Office of Mine Safety reinstitute worker safety regulations dropped in the Bush years? And will that impose burdens on business as we try to revive the economy? What's the effect of the jump in the minimum wage?
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