House rules are to publish the full legislations 72 hours before a vote, but I believe they waived that rule for this one, saying it was "just like" the one voted on before, but without the add-ons.
Apparently it wasn't the same.
My outrage is tempered by the fact that I don't want to complain about A.S. not having minimum wage, I want to complain about the rest of us HAVING it. If the result of my screaming "hypocrisy" is just an amendment in the Senate to put A.S. into the same state as the rest of us, I will feel like I've won a battle but lost the war.
Better to have them be the only place not infected by the minimum wage bill, so we can point to it as a shining example for the rest of us.
American Samoa does have a federally mandated
minimum wage, which varies by industry. The minimum wage in the tuna canneries is $3.26 per hour. The minimum wage in other industries ranges from $2.68 per hour (garment industry) to 4.09 per hour (maritime). The minimum wage rates are reviewed about every two years by a wage board.
Pelosi's hypocrisy notwithstanding, raising the minimum wage for the tuna canneries would likely cause the canneries to close. They simply wouldn't be able to compete with canneries in places like Thailand and Ecuador, where workers are already paid less than a dollar per hour. And as I understand it, American Samoa doesn't have much industry besides the canneries.
Note that American Samoa has a Democrat nonvoting House delegate. The Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, whose minimum wage was raised to the federal rate, doesn't have a House delegate at all (it elects a Resident Representative, who is little more than a Washington lobbyist) but is a nominally Republican area. Jack Abramoff did a lot of lobbying for the CNMI.