Trackbacked at Wizbang:
Yeah, this place has been a bit boring as of late. Things at my day job are absolutely nuts right now, and there are some personal issues I’m having to deal with, so this blog has been way down my list of priorities lately. Sue me.
But this little tidbit struck my fancy.
The Democrats are in charge of Congress. One of the things they promised back in November was to raise the Minimum Wage. They told us you can’t raise a family on $5.15 an hour and the minimum wage must be raised to $7.25 an hour. That’s still only $15,000 a year, and I doubt many can raise a family on that wage. If the Democrats were serious about getting people out of poverty why wouldn’t they want to raise the minimum wage to, say, around $20 an hour?
On Wednesday, the House voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. The bill also extends for the first time the federal minimum wage to the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands. However, it exempts American Samoa, another Pacific island territory that would become the only U.S. territory not subject to federal minimum-wage laws.
Now why wouldn’t the Democrats want a $7.25 per hour minimum wage in American Samoa but would make it the law of the land everywhere else?
One of the biggest opponents of the federal minimum wage in Samoa is StarKist Tuna, which owns one of the two packing plants that together employ more than 5,000 Samoans, or nearly 75 percent of the island’s work force. StarKist Tuna says the higher minimum wage would be an undue financial burden on them and would wreck the fragile economy of American Samoa. The average wage for tuna workers in American Samoa is $3.60 an hour.
According to the chairman of the House, Education and Labor Committee, Democrat George Miller of California, the economy of American Samoa doesn’t have the ability to handle the United States’ minimum wage and should be exempt.
But the clincher to this deal with StarKist is that their parent company, Del Monte Corp., has headquarters in San Francisco, which is represented by Mrs. Pelosi. And the other packing plant in American Samoa is run by California-based Chicken of the Sea.
Coincidence? Anybody care to take a closer look at the campaign contributions of Democrats in the last election? One thing is for sure, the delegate from American Samoa, a Democrat, is loaded down with campaign cash from the tuna industry.
Democrat, Congress, Minimum Wage, American Samoa, StarKist, Pelosi
