By Zaldy Dandan
Variety Editor

IT’S either amnesia or chutzpah — or maybe both, and I’m referring to the recent comments by the CNMI House Republicans regarding the local minimum wage. They said that the Bitter Times administration and legislative leadership have been sitting on wage hike bills that were introduced even before the U.S. Democrats took over Congress. “If we had acted on any of these measures,” the minority leader was quoted as saying, “we would not have this predicament now.”
This is coming from members of a political party that ran the governor’s office for 20 of the 28 years during the 1978-2006 period, and who’s former long-time chairman is now governor. (The Covenant Party, as Stanley T. Torres once noted, is merely the “Republitan” wing of the GOP.) The same party that was almost always in the majority in both houses of the Legislature since the inauguration of the commonwealth government 29 years ago.
Already salivating over the prospects of regaining the confidence of voters who are suffering from the GOP’s incompetence, the party’s members are, once again, pointing fingers and washing their hands of the mess they helped create.
It was the Republican Senate and Republican House that repealed the 1993 gradual wage hike measure in Dec. 1995 over then-Gov. Lang Tenorio’s veto. He told lawmakers that the repeal would “provoke” critics of the CNMI’s labor and immigration policies in Washington, D.C. But the garment industry claimed that the “$2.75 [wage rate per hour] is already a breaking point…any more increase and some factories will shut down.” Moreover, the midterm elections for that year were already over, so guess who won the affection of your lawmakers — the common people or the garment industry.
In Nov. 2001, the people gave the GOP an overwhelming mandate for change. Finally, the commonwealth had a governor who said the CNMI needed a wage hike and a Legislature that couldn’t agree more. For two years, Jan. 2002-Jan. 2004, the Republicans could have passed anything on Capital Hill. They did nothing. Governor Babauta and his allies in the Legislature blocked Speaker Heinz’s wage hike bill because it would have exempted garment workers. And because Heinz would get the credit for a popular measure. Babauta, who presented himself as someone who was not in the SGMA’s pockets, then hired the former spokesman of the garment industry and lobbied Congress to give more trade privileges to Saipan manufacturers. Now the former governor is again lecturing us about why a wage hike is “overdue.”
Referring to Governor Fitial’s “sudden” support for a wage hike — whose passage in the Democratic Congress is inevitable — one of the CNMI House Republicans said, “We’re glad he is finally opening his eyes.”
Things will finally get better once CNMI voters open theirs.

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Regarding the American Samoa tiered wage system that the Bitter Times administration and lawmakers now favor, here’s what a lawyer who worked and resided in the Marianas has to say: “It doesn’t…work too well in a one industry burg like [American Samoa]. How will it work here where you have a more varied economy and one which has allowed a large number of people to hire maids at $300 a month? The contracts say that they only work 60 hours a week but I suspect that many work 80-90 hours a week, cleaning, cooking, baby-sitting, washing the cars, ironing and maybe even servicing the boss on occasion. … How do you establish fair wages for the hospitality industry? How do you compare a Stardust employee with a waitress or bartender at the Hyatt? The members of the wage review board or boards will go nuts.”
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