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Mondav. April 1, 1991 / University Daily Kansan
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Base hourly wage increases to $4.25
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The minimum wage increases by 45 cents an hour today to $4.25, but labor advocates already are pressing for more.
About 3 million Americans earn the minimum wage, and millions of higher-paid workers may benefit as well when the minimum increases from $3.80 an hour. But workers' advocates contend the increase still is far too paltry to lift low-wage workers out of poverty.
"They can't support a family on this and in many cases can't support themselves," said Rudy Oswald, chief economist of the AFL-CIO.
The 14.2 million-member labor federation has called for boosting the minimum wage to $5.75 an hour by April 1994. And Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, has promised that his committee would take up minimum wage legislation during the current Congress, either this year or in 1992.
Small Kansas towns strive for consideration as jailers
By Joe Gose
Kansan staff writer
TOPEKA — Small Kansas towns, facing declining populations and economic peril, will become the nation'sailer.
More than 40 residents from Atwood and Washington showed up at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting Friday to deliver that message by opposing a bill that would prohibit small towns from owning and operating private prisons.
Representatives from the towns said the ability to build these prisons, which would take inmates from states that have been allowed to house them, was the towns last chance for survival.
"We just want one more chance," said Richard Mills Jr. of Westridge Associates, a Topeka consulting firm hired by the communities. "Washington County has lost 70 percent of its population. They are out of time."
"If it continues on the same course it has in the last couple of years, the city of Washington will be dead in 45 years."
Bill Beamgard, Atwood mayor-elect, agreed.
"Our most precious product is our children," he said. "We're tired of seeing them leave. We're dying and we see this as economic development."
State Sen. Wint Winter Jr.,
R-Lawrence, said that the
issue had been discussed for
more than a year and that lawmakers had made their minds up to support the bill to prohibit the private prisons
"This is a matter that the Legislature has considered very, very extensive," he said. "But it's hazardous to take prisoners in from other states."
Winter added that the committee would act on the bill this week.
State Sen. Richard Rock, D-Akansas City, said liability issues needed to be cleared up if any measure could be passed
"I would love to sit up here and do things for the small communities in the state," he said. "I live on the state as a whole. I'm convinced that there are some profound problems."
State Sen. Sheila Frahm, RC, collyed, one of those problems was the state's responsibility to provide security if the prison's private security staff would go on strike.
But Mills said that the communities would keep coming back to lobby for private prisons because they represented the last hope for the towns' continued existence.
"We know that prisons are viewed as ugly, but the ugliness is on the surface only," he said. "We believe we can see some beauty in these projects."
April
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