Senate To Begin Debate Today On Minimum Wage Vote Set For Tuesday, But Clinton Warns Of Possible Veto

The Senate is poised to vote at last on an increase in the minimum wage, but there’s no guarantee that will end the partisan gridlock over the election-year issue.

Before lawmakers left town for their Fourth of July recess, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., broke a long stalemate by agreeing to start debate today and vote Tuesday.

But an amendment crafted by conservative Republicans could leave the Senate still hung up in the partisan hammer-lock that held it before Lott and Daschle cut their deal.

Meanwhile, the House is planning to take up two spending bills - one financing Congress itself and a second covering the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. It already has passed seven of the 13 spending bills for fiscal 1997. If time permits, the House also will turn to legislation aimed at discouraging same-sex marriages.

And both chambers will convene in a joint meeting Wednesday to hear an address by newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

President Clinton has threatened to veto the minimum-wage legislation if the chairman of the Senate Small Business Committee, Christopher Bond, R-Mo., succeeds in attaching an amendment exempting employees of companies with less than $500,000 in gross receipts.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Clinton said that provision would exempt two-thirds of American businesses and branded it a “poison pill.”

“Don’t be fooled. It’s a cruel shell game,” Labor Secretary Robert Reich told the National Press Club. “This is their response to the invisible workers of America: ‘Here’s 90 cents - unless you’re among the excluded millions.”’

Republicans dismissed Clinton’s threat and said Bond’s amendment is needed to shield small businesses from the job-killing effects of what amounts to a 20 percent increase in their labor costs.

“He can call it a ‘poison pill’; he can call it anything he wants. My guess is he will sign it if it gets to his desk,” said Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, R-Okla.

The minimum-wage bill, cleared 281-144 by the House on May 23, provides a two-step increase - from $4.25 to $4.75 immediately and then, on July 1, 1997, to $5.15. It is paired with a package of tax breaks, mostly for business.

Bond’s amendment also would delay the effective date of the increases by six months - to Jan. 1, 1997, and Jan. 1, 1998. And he would double the period during which businesses could pay a training wage - from 90 days under the House version to 180 days. He also would permit the training wage, which would be less than the minimum wage, for workers of all ages, not just for workers younger than 20. Meanwhile, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., plans to offer an amendment that would shorten the training wage period to 30 days and strike a provision in the House bill excluding workers who earn tips.

The Senate tax-break package, intended to soften the blow to businesses of the wage raise, is more generous than the House’s - roughly $11 billion over eight years compared with $7 billion.

Both bills liberalize equipment writeoffs for small businesses and offer them a new type of simple pension plan. The bills would temporarily reinstate several expired tax breaks, including the exemption for employer-paid tuition.

The Senate bill also allows couples to make tax-deductible contributions of up to $4,000 a year to Individual Retirement Accounts even if one spouse does not work outside the home. The current limit for such couples is $2,250.

After the Senate disposes of the tax-cut and minimum-wage bill, it will turn to separate GOP legislation known as the TEAM Act. It relaxes the rules governing the creation of worker-management groups outside of collective bargaining. Democrats are counting on Clinton to veto it.

Any Senate minimum-wage bill would have to be reconciled with the House version. If the final bill arrives on Clinton’s desk in acceptable form, then Democrats would allow the Senate to consider House-passed legislation reducing the gasoline tax by 4.3 cents per gallon through December. GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole proposed the temporary rollback before leaving the Senate to campaign full time.

However, Nickles is threatening to block House and Senate negotiators from meeting on the minimum wage unless a separate standoff is resolved over legislation guaranteeing workers who leave their jobs continued access to health insurance, even if they have health problems. At issue is the scope of a pilot project testing the feasibility of tax-exempt medical savings accounts.

“Personally, I can’t see us going to conference on minimum wage unless we have a conference on the health bill. It’s a question of priorities,” Nickles said in a telephone interview.