ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604220060
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: CLAY CHANDLER THE WASHINGTON POST
REPUBLICANS SAY many of those who earn the minimum wage get support from parents and are well above the poverty line.
At the center of the partisan squabble over President Clinton's call for a 90-cent increase in the minimum wage are two warring notions about who would benefit.
Republican opponents of the proposal, which would raise the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour, denounce it as a windfall that would largely go to high school- and college-age workers - many of them part-time earners from families well above the poverty line.
Not so, supporters say. They depict the measure as a vital lifeline for struggling workers from low- and middle-income families who have not shared in the recent growth of the economy.
While they present starkly different portraits of who would benefit, both sides love to paint by number.
On some numbers, there is little argument:
* Approximately 9.7 million workers would benefit from the proposed increase in the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That includes the 2 million workers who earn the current legal minimum plus 7.7 million who are earning more than $4.25 but less than $5.15.
* The majority of those who would benefit from the proposal - 57 percent, according to the bureau - would be part-time workers.
* Many would be younger workers: 31.4 percent would be younger than 20; 53 percent would be younger than 25.
* A slight majority of those who would earn the minimum wage under the plan are women. Nineteen percent are married women, the majority of whom would be part-time workers.
There is disagreement, though, about how many of those likely to gain from an increase in the minimum wage would be the sole breadwinners in their families. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 38.8 percent of workers who would get a raise under the plan are the only earners in their household.
But officials at the Employment Policies Institute, which is supported by more than a hundred of the nation's largest companies, many of them restaurant firms, says that figure is misleading because it includes students or other single youths living alone who might be receiving generous support from their parents.
The institute estimates the number of sole breadwinners to be only 8.5 percent of all minimum-wage workers.
Economists generally concur with the White House assertion that poor workers would be the primary beneficiaries of an increase in the minimum wage.
But they caution that the wage-increase proposal is a crude policy tool at best. The proposed increase in the minimum wage would ``target, on balance, people who are in poor families, but it would do so rather sloppily,'' said David Neumark, a labor economist at Michigan State University.
LENGTH: Medium: 60 linesby CNB