Union Leader Predicts OK Soon on Rise in Minimum Wage

Amid intensified political pressure for increasing the federal minimum wage, the nation’s No. 2 union leader predicted Monday in Los Angeles that Congress will boost the hourly pay minimum before this summer.

Moreover, once the federal standard is raised from its current $4.25 an hour, unions next will focus their attention on promoting legislation providing universal health-care coverage, said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka.

“We won’t rest until every American has health care,” said Trumka, 46, a fiery orator who was elected to his current post in October as part of a militant ticket that pledged to revive the AFL-CIO as a political and economic force.

Trumka was visiting Los Angeles to preside over a downtown hearing, attended by an estimated 400 to 500 unionists and their allies, that was conducted as part of the AFL-CIO’s “America Needs a Raise” publicity campaign.

The campaign, officially launched last week and due to appear in as many as 30 U.S. cities before concluding in mid-June, is intended to drum up popular support for legislation intended to ease the plight of the working poor.

Trumka, in an interview after the hearing, cited national opinion polls showing that more than three-quarters of American adults favor an increase in the minimum wage as the basis for his optimism that Republican opposition to a raise will be overcome.

The Clinton administration has long favored raising the minimum in two steps to $5.15 an hour. But its proposal appeared dead until a group of moderate Republicans this month defied their party’s leaders to support an increase to $5.25, causing ongoing political jockeying that could soon lead to a vote on one of the minimum wage proposals.

Trumka said he was also buoyed by the success unions and their allies had in gathering signatures for a California ballot proposition to raise the state’s minimum to $5.75 an hour by March 1998. The proposition is expected to qualify easily for the November ballot.