hat this country really, really needs is a lower minimum wage. So saith Senator Robert Bennett, the dour Republican from Utah who drew the short straw in the Senate wrangle Wednesday to defend the GOP's foot-dragging on bringing the minimum-wage increase to a vote.
It was Ted Kennedy, as usual, leading the charge for a pair of half-buck-an-hour pay hikes for the millions who toil in unglamorous occupations for the current federal minimum of $5.15 (half that for restaurant workers who get tips). With a full head of steam and his Irish up over Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's refusal to bring the issue to a pre-election vote, Kennedy denounced the GOP's invidiousness as ''unconscionable.''
To Bennett fell the chore of explaining the classical Republican argument on the matter, to wit: why less money is better for poor people. When the first federal minimum wage came into effect in 1938 (that's why your grandparents, if they were working class, revered FDR), it set 25 cents an hour as the floor. But when little Bobbie Bennett was 14, he went to work for the minimum of 50 cents an hour - and he convinced all within his hearing Wednesday that he was overpaid.
Yes, he confessed contritely, he was cheating his employer, the other employees, the stockholders, and who knows who else, intoned Utah's answer to the guy with the pitchfork in the Grant Wood painting. He never told the C-SPAN audience exactly what it was that he was doing, or not doing, to not earn his 50 cents per hour. But he wants you to know ''it was one of the most important formative experiences of my life.'' I say a bargain, at half a buck an hour.
That's too bad, if you're a minimum-wage worker now, because Bennett says your real problem is lack of ''skills,'' lack of ''training,'' and, he sighs with a shake of his bald dome, you're just not worth $6.15 an hour, which is what Kennedy and his Democrats want to raise you to in two 50-cent jumps.
Your problem, if you happen to be shoveling something unpleasant for $5.15 an hour, is that you don't understand ''the real world.'' For the slow-witted, Bennett elaborated: ''The law of supply and demand gives you a price'' for your labor. And further, ''it is always the right price.'' The man's faith in the free market is touching.
Bennett complained that the problem with minimum-wage workers today in the low-unemployment Clinton-Gore economy is that if they don't like the pay here, they can go somewhere else. ''They're in a position where they can pick and choose,'' he grumped, betraying the basic fallacy of free marketeers opposed to raising the minimum: They don't like the free market so much when it gives jobholders the freedom to shove off for greener pastures.
There was more palaver about how the unemployed young black males of the inner city need lower-than-minimum wage jobs to teach them skills. How you get the often-unemployable young to work for $4 an hour when they won't work for $7 an hour, Bennett did not say. He tossed in a few cracks about Kennedy's ''indignation,'' then the Senate went back to its snail-like crawl.
But you get the idea. Eventually, the deal will be cut. It's an election year. The GOP is holding out for some tax breaks for businesses, natch, in exchange for lobbing a crust of bread in the direction of the proletariat. Kennedy is standing up for the little people here.
''It's a woman's issue, because the majority of minimum-wage workers are women. It's a children's issue because these women have children. It's a civil rights issue, because the majority of these people are black and Hispanic. And it's a family values issue,'' thundered the liberal champion.
There are 262,000 Massachusetts workers at the $6.00 state minimum, and the state floor will rise to $6.75 an hour by 2001. Kennedy is mocked back home by rivals in his Senate race for his interest in raising wages at the bottom.
''He is the system,'' complains Jack E. Robinson, the Republican trying to eject Kennedy from the Senate. The Libertarian candidate, Carla Howell, runs radio spots blasting Kennedy for bringing home the federal pork that's building the Big Dig. To the thousands of construction workers driving new pickup trucks because of their high union wage rates and bountiful overtime, that is probably not a persuasive argument.
Climb the Necco Street parking garage to the roof, and you have a seagull's-eye view of just what the Big Dig has dug. The other day I counted 35 construction cranes in use, maybe not all on the Big Dig, but all part of downtown's biggest boom. You can argue about this piece or that piece. But you cannot dispute Kennedy's role in the city's economic rejuvenation.
The only foe who can bring King Ted to the ground this year is Old King Cholesterol. Jack E. Robinson is right: Teddy is the system.
David Nyhan's e-mail address is nyhan@globe.com.
