Senate Approves Minimum Wage Raise

WASHINGTON--The Senate gave final passage yesterday to legislation to raise the hourly minimum wage to $4.25 by April 1991, the first increase in the floor wage since 1981.

The 89-8 Senate vote came eight days after President Bush and congressional Democrats agreed on the plan to boost the minimum wage by 45 cents next April 1 and another 45 cents a year later.

Bush is expected to sign the bill next week.

The measure, passed overwhelmingly by the House last week, also creates a new, subminimum wage that could be paid to teen-agers for their first three months in the work force and up to three months more for those in certified training or education programs.

Bush's signature will not only trigger the first increase in the minimum wage in nearly a decade but also will end a bitter stalemate between congressional Democrats and successive Republican administrations over the politically charged issue.

"The nine-year logjam on the minimum wage is finally broken," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54-'56 (D-Mass.), a key architect of the compromise. "The working poor are about to receive an increase, although it is not as much as they deserve."

Kennedy promised to return to the issue and seek another increase as the 1992 presidential election nears. Democrats may try to use the issue against Bush then, but yesterday they had praise for the president.

"We all owe a debt of gratitude to the president of the United States, who was willing to stand up and support a minimum wage increase, thereby reversing the policy of the prior administration, which had consistently opposed any increase," said Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, one of two Republicans who unsuccessfully sought to amend the measure, credited Democrats and Kennedy with a victory over the White House in the compromise talks.

"He's won with the president," Hatch said of Kennedy. "He got the president to come his way."

The final vote came afer Hatch and a handful of other conservative Republicans long opposed to any increase made a spirited rhetorical effort to derail the compromise by defeating or amending it.

The minimum wage, frozen at $3.35 an hour since January 1981, is paid to about four million American workers. But the legislation likely will have a broader impact by driving up the wages of workers who now make slightly more than the minimum wage, particularly those covered by collective bargaining agreements.