WASHINGTON (PAI) - By a 94-3 vote on Feb. 1, the new Democratic-run Senate approved the first raise in the federal minimum wage in a decade. But to get enough GOP votes that successfully stopped a Republican filibuster two days before, senators festooned it with $8 billion in tax breaks for "small business."

The Senate vote sends the minimum wage bill back to the Democratic-run House, which approved a raise in the wage early in January with no strings attached. Unions and their allies who lobbied for it vowed to continue to fight to strip the Senate measure of the amendments with business tax breaks.

"Do you have such disdain for hard-working Americans that you want to pile all your amendments on this?" Sen. Edward Kennedy, on the Senate floor, asked Republican lawmakers. "Why don't you just hold your amendments until other pieces of legislation? Why this volume of amendments on just the issue to try and raise the minimum wage? What is it about it that drives you Republicans crazy? What is it? Something. Something! What is the price that the workers have to pay to get an increase? What is it about working men and women that you find so offensive?"

Union presidents, including AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee, also blasted the Senate's tax breaks.

"It's just plain wrong to ask these working families to wait even longer to receive a minimum wage increase while many of our nation's leaders shower big business with additional tax perks," Sweeney said.

If finally approved, the minimum wage would rise in three steps in slightly more than two years, from its present $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour in 2009. The labor-backed Economic Policy Institute calculated the hike would help 13 million workers directly and indirectly, with 60 percent of them women, 40 percent minorities and four-fifths adults.

Besides the tax breaks, Republicans tried to attach many "poison pill" amendments to the minimum wage, including flextime. All failed. But they stalled the debate.

The outlook for the measure is uncertain: The House margin for the clean minimum wage - 315-116, including 83 Republicans - signals there could be a deadlock over the tax breaks. And President George W. Bush says he will not sign a minimum wage hike without those business tax cuts he demands.

Those tax cuts would add to $36 billion in tax cuts passed for "small business" during Bush's reign and $276 billion in business tax cuts overall.

The key Senate votes on the minimum wage were not on final passage, but to break GOP filibusters. On the second 88-8 vote, all the naysayers were Republicans. That second filibuster was against the bill that combined both the minimum wage hike and the tax cuts. An earlier filibuster, against the minimum wage alone, was kept alive when 43 GOP senators voted for it. They need only 41 votes to keep any talk-a-thon going.