Clinton Urges Minimum Wage Hike of 90 Cents : Labor: Call for rise to $5.15 an hour over two years confronts GOP leaders on issue President sees as political winner.

WASHINGTON — Deliberately confronting Congress’ Republican leaders on an issue that he thinks is a political winner, President Clinton proposed Friday to increase the $4.25 federal minimum wage by an unexpectedly large 90 cents over two years.

Conservative Republicans denounced the idea but some GOP leaders carefully hedged their bets. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that he is skeptical about a wage increase but is “not ruling it out.” Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said: “There may be some compromise.”

The proposed raise is bigger than the 75-cent increase that Clinton aides floated two weeks ago. And the President’s public announcement attended by leading Democratic liberals was a shift in tactics from the conciliatory, bipartisan effort that he initially promised.

“The only way to grow the middle class and shrink the underclass is to make work pay,” Clinton said in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. “In terms of real buying power, the minimum wage will be at a 40-year low next year if we do not raise it above $4.25 an hour.”

The President said that he still hopes to attract Republican support for raising the wage to $5.15 an hour. “This has always been a bipartisan issue,” he said.

But Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) made it clear that they intend to paint Republican opponents of the wage hike as indifferent to the problems of ordinary working people.

“We’re going to fight very hard for this minimum wage increase because it’s just, it’s right, it’s necessary, it doesn’t cost jobs and we want to make work pay for the average American,” Reich said. “You cannot make a living on $8,500 a year.”

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Reich noted that many Republicans, including both Gingrich and Dole, voted in favor of the last increase in the minimum wage during the George Bush Administration in 1989. “If you did it before, why wouldn’t you do it now?” he asked.

“I believe when the vote comes, a lot of Republicans are going to break from the leadership on their side that’s saying we shouldn’t have a minimum wage at all,” Gephardt said. “That’s a totally extreme, far-out position.”

He was apparently referring to House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), who has said that he will fight a minimum wage increase “with every fiber of my being.”

Despite the President’s high-minded talk of bipartisanship, some of his own political aides have found it difficult to contain their glee at most Republicans’ rejection of a position that is widely popular.

A Los Angeles Times Poll last month found that 72% of Americans favor a minimum wage increase, with only 24% opposed. Even Republican voters favor an increase, by the still-wide margin of 62% to 35%.

In the minimum wage, Clinton aides believe they have found a vulnerable spot in the armor of the Republicans who swept to victory in last November’s congressional elections.

In his State of the Union Address last month, Clinton said that he wanted a higher minimum wage but did not make a specific proposal--to increase the chances of a bipartisan compromise, aides said.

But the issue turned out to be so popular, both in the public and among Democratic members of Congress, that White House strategists were swung toward a more confrontational strategy.

One key figure pushing Clinton toward a tougher stance was Gephardt, who has been critical of the President for his conciliatory approach to the new Republican majority--and who wanted a wage increase bigger than 75 cents.

A senior Clinton aide said that, after talking with Gephardt and other Democratic leaders, the President decided that he had a better chance of winning a wage increase of some size by sending Congress a specific proposal.

The shift in White House tactics drew howls of annoyance from the Republican committee chairpersons who are likely to handle the issue, Sen. Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan.) and Rep. H. James Saxton (R-N.J.), both of whom complained that the White House never consulted them before making its proposal.

Nevertheless, Dole and Gingrich both promised Clinton a fair hearing, centering on economists’ conflicting views of whether a higher minimum wage will prompt employers to eliminate jobs.

Gingrich charged that a wage increase “may kill American jobs and . . . may well increase black teen-age unemployment.” He warned that the devaluation of the peso is pushing wage rates in Mexico sharply downward in dollar terms, “widening the wage gap” between Mexican and American workers.

But Clinton’s chief economic adviser, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, dismissed both arguments. She said most economists have concluded that the loss of jobs after a modest minimum wage increase is “negligible.”

Tyson said the drop in Mexican wage rates should not affect the U.S. decision because “we don’t want to compete with Mexico on the basis of low wages. We want to compete on the basis of productivity, skills and innovation.”

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Past Increases

President Clinton wants to increase the minimum wage over two years to $5.15. Congress appears unlikely to approve the increase.

Minimum wage, dollars per hour:

1955 - $0.75 1991 - $4.25 1997 - $5.15** projected under Clinton’s proposal