[Workers are celebrating minimum-wage increases around the
country, but the new frontier is already creeping toward $20. ]
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$15, TAKE A BOW. $20 IN OUR SIGHTS!
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Gabrielle Gurley
January 11, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Workers are celebrating minimum-wage increases around the country,
but the new frontier is already creeping toward $20. _
, Fight for 15 Chicago
The New Year blew in with higher wages for workers in dozens of
jurisdictions across the country. Twenty-five states and 60 localities
will raise their minimum wages in 2024. What is clear from even a
cursory scan of these increases is that while a $15 minimum wage is
the floor, many localities and some states have already passed wage
increases that are higher than what the Fight for $15 movement
coalesced around more than a decade ago. A number have landed on a $17
minimum wage for some or all employees, an encouraging development in
the ongoing struggle to establish living wages nationwide.
Multiple California municipalities will pay $17 per hour or more by
the end of the calendar year, along with Denver, Seattle, and two
other Washington cities, SeaTac and Tukwila. In New Jersey, long-term
care workers will see a boost to $18.13. One striking fact that stands
out in the National Employment Law Project’s 2023 analysis
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minimum-wage trends is that many worker advocates now see $15 as the
floor and $20 as the new frontier. Most Americans work
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midsized and larger American companies—and even some “not
typically pro-worker companies” have already come around
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paying employees a $15 wage. Since 2020, Best Buy, Costco, and Labcorp
increased hourly pay
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or more. A few others—Charter Communications, Chobani, and
Barclays—pay hourly rates of $20 and up.
_MORE FROM GABRIELLE GURLEY_
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The $20 debate is under way in Massachusetts, with metro Boston
driving the debate over the prospect of setting a $20 minimum wage by
2027, where the minimum is $15 now. Some state lawmakers and
groups supporting
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increase argue that inflation has eaten away at any gains that the
current wage level once provided.
Massachusetts has a persistent unaffordability dynamic in play. Child
care is more expensive than a state-college education. The state has
some of the highest annual child care costs
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toddlers at $19,961, representing more than 50 percent of the median
single mother’s income, and close to 15 percent for a married couple
with children. In-state tuition at University of Massachusetts Amherst
is $17,364 for the current academic year.
Boston’s journey to the top of the charts of high-cost cities puts
it in a company familiar to major metro denizens. The monthly median
rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2,860, the
third-highest in the country behind San Francisco and New York.
Bostonians have seen the fifth-highest increase in food prices
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the country.
Only a few places see those kinds of astronomical price tags, of
course, but every region of the country is seeing its own distinct
version of the failure of wages to keep up with the basics—like
food—which makes the daily grind that much more distressing.
American consumers continue to spend more on food, whose costs have
increased more than 11 percent from 2021 to 2022 according to
Agriculture Department data
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with 2022 seeing the speediest hikes in prices since 1979. Food price
hikes have been highest
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the Northeast; the Dakotas, Montana, and Iowa also saw sharp
increases. Among cities, Philadelphia ranks first
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the steepest jumps, followed by Baltimore, Albany, and Syracuse.
Where wages set by employers aren’t moving fast enough, the job is
falling to voters to make up the difference through ballot measures.
Alaska, California, Ohio, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Missouri currently
have minimum-wage ballot campaigns under way.
“When you see the failures of either the federal government or the
state government to meet the needs of people,” says Richard von
Glahn, political director for Missouri Jobs with Justice, an advocacy
group leading the minimum wage/sick leave initiative campaign,
“people are going to try to make democracy work for them in another
way.”
Where wages set by employers aren’t moving fast enough, the job is
falling to voters to make up the difference through ballot measures.
The campaign is collecting signatures for a graduated minimum-wage
increase to $15 by 2026, along with an earned sick leave provision
that would give workers one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours
worked. So far, the campaign has collected more than 180,000
signatures, and von Glahn estimates that it will finish up by the
early-May submission deadline with about 200,000. (A citizen-initiated
measure needs 115,000 from certain geographic areas to appear on the
ballot.) Voters have approved two minimum-wage hikes over the past 18
years, one in 2006 linked to a cost-of-living adjustment, which passed
with 75 percent of the vote, and a second in 2018 that increased wages
to $12 by 2023, which passed with 62 percent of the vote.
“The status quo is too low to begin with,” says von Glahn. “The
reality is the current minimum wage of $12.30 an hour is $25,000 a
year for a full-time worker, and you can’t survive on that in
Missouri.”
On January 1, Missouri increased its minimum wage to $12.30. According
to the MIT Living Wage Calculator
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single Missourian is $15.77. St. Louis and Kansas City each tried to
increase minimum-wage rates in 2015, but Republican state lawmakers
preempted the Democratic cities’ proposals.
Missouri politicians understand, in some cases, that low minimum wages
present serious retention problems. Two years ago, state lawmakers
raised the minimum wage for state employees to $15 per hour after Gov.
Mike Parson lamented
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turnover and vacancy rates in the state government workforce, one of
Missouri’s largest. In 2023, those workers received a more than 8
percent cost-of-living increase.
The federal minimum wage refuses to budge, another bullet point on the
long list of problems that Congress has stepped away from. Republicans
seem to be impervious to the idea that $7.25 per hour is nowhere near
enough money for one person to support themselves, much less a family.
Thwarted in his efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 in 2021 by
Senate Republicans whose opposition kept the measure from winning a
60-vote supermajority, President Biden pivoted to an executive order
raising it for federal contractors’ employees, only to have a
federal judge in Texas block the order in Louisiana, Mississippi, and
Texas. The Labor Department has appealed
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Members of Congress have dueling plans certain to go nowhere fast.
Democrats have introduced a bill
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would raise the federal minimum wage to $17 by 2028, which is
countered by a Senate Republican plan
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would increase the wage to $11 over four years.
_Prospect senior editor and award-winning journalist Gabrielle Gurley
writes and edits work on states and cities, transportation and
infrastructure, civil rights, and climate. Follow @gurleygg_
Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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