The amendment would also allow employers to pay all new employees a sub-minimum wage of $4.25 for the worker's first 180 days.

What this is is an impetus toward a sub-minimum wage.

So a sub-minimum wage, reduced because that supposedly offsets training costs, is pure pretense.

Mr. Bush would not have to insist on a sub-minimum wage.

At the same time, life goes "very badly," she said, with sub-minimum wages and rising prices.

But he and other Democrats oppose the sub-minimum wage, which the Administration calls a training wage.

The modern sweatshops are filled with new immigrants, some of them children, working for sub-minimum wages under conditions that invite another catastrophe.

Illegal sweatshops subject immigrants to harsh conditions and sub-minimum wages.

The behavior of the companies is in sharp contrast to the importance President Bush attached to the sub-minimum wage.

Indeed, future studies might turn up more use of the sub-minimum wage.