WASHINGTON (AP) — Fending off charges of favoritism, House Democrats say a just-passed minimum wage bill will be changed to cover all U.S. territories — including American Samoa — before it reaches President Bush’s desk.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters she has instructed the House Education and Labor Committee to help get the bill changed to “make sure that all of the territories have to comply with the U.S. law on the minimum wage.”
Her remarks Friday followed accusations from Republicans a day earlier that American Samoa, which is not now covered by the $5.15 an hour federal minimum wage, was not included in the law raising the federal pay floor to $7.25 an hour because StarKist has a large cannery in the island chain. StarKist is owned by Del Monte Foods Co., which has its headquarters in San Francisco, Pelosi’s district.
“Something is indeed fishy when the federal minimum wage is good for all Americans as espoused by the Democrat majority, yet we exempt a small, in many ways economically struggling island,” Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., told colleagues on the House floor last week.
The bill was passed Wednesday by the House as part of the Democrats’ 100-hour agenda. The measure included in its coverage another U.S. territory, the Northern Mariana Islands, which had been shielded in the past from the wage law with the help of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now serving a prison sentence.
A spokesman for Pelosi said the bill excluded American Samoa at the request of nonvoting Delegate Eni Faleomavaega, a Democrat who represents the Pacific island territories in the House.
Raising the federal minimum wage would devastate the local tuna industry, Faleomavaega said in a statement last week, noting that American Samoa’s economy is “more than 80 percent” dependent on two U.S. tuna processors, Chicken of the Sea and StarKist. Faleomavaega said the Labor Department reviews Samoa’s minimum wage every two years.
But a spokesman for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the author of the minimum wage bill, said Saturday American Samoa does not need to be covered by the minimum wage requirement because of the regular Labor Department review. However, he said, the House committee will examine whether the Labor review is adequate.
“The criticisms of the minimum wage bill are coming from people who for years prevented reforms that would have put a stop to horrific labor abuses in the Northern Mariana Islands,” said Miller spokesman Tom Kiley.