Congress OKs minimum-wage rise

WASHINGTON — Congress on Thursday approved the first increase in the federal minimum wage in nearly a decade, voting to boost wages for America's lowest-paid workers from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour over the next two years.

The bill, which a spokesman for President Bush said he would sign, would end the longest stretch without an increase in the federal minimum wage since it was established in 1938. It would also mark a victory for congressional Democrats, becoming the first item to be enacted from an eight-point agenda that House leaders set during their first 100 hours in power.

The wage increase was largely ignored, however, during an acrimonious debate over the emergency spending bill for the Iraq war, to which it was attached. The tactic of attaching it to a must-pass bill deflected attention from an issue that Democrats hammered at effectively during last year's election. But it ensured that the wage increase and $4.8 billion in corresponding business tax breaks would take effect despite objections from the White House and other Republicans who wanted a larger package of business incentives.

"Despite our dislike for this package of tax breaks," Bush plans to sign the bill, said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "The Democrats put this tax package together, and it's not sufficiently focused on the economic concerns of small businesses who will be most negatively affected by the minimum-wage hike."

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., who fought for months to restrict the size of the tax breaks, called the final product a "responsible package that provides the first wage increase in a decade and targets tax relief to small businesses."

Over the past decade, inflation has depleted the value of the minimum wage to its lowest level in more than 50 years. Thirty states and the District of Columbia have set higher minimum wages; the minimum wage in Washington state is $7.93.

The minimum-wage increase was just one of the domestic spending add-ons to the war-funding bill, which also contained provisions to help hurricane victims, dairy farmers, airlines, salmon fishermen and rural counties hurt by cutbacks in federal logging.

Dairy farmers will receive $1.2 billion in aid as lawmakers renewed a subsidy program aimed at smaller milk producers.

The measure also contained $60 million in help for salmon fishermen, tribes and processors in California and Oregon, where lowered Klamath River flows have wrecked salmon runs.

Also in the Northwest, rural counties harmed by reduced revenues from timber harvested on federal lands won a one-year, $425 million extension of a federal payment program.