Two Minimum Wage Bills Pass in Minnesota

I’ve got to hand it to Minnesota’s legislature. In addition to last week’s House vote to legalize same-sex marriage (with the Senate expected to follow suit today), the House and Senate have now each passed a bill to raise the state minimum wage!

This is especially good news for women, who make up 70 percent of Minnesota’s minimum wage workers. Raising the minimum wage would improve economic security for thousands of women while boosting the state’s economy – and it could help narrow the gender wage gap because women are the majority of workers who would benefit. In Minnesota in 2011, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid just under 80 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

But here’s the catch: the bills passed by the two chambers are quite different from one another. The House bill would raise the state minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2015, then index it annually to keep up with inflation. (Minnesota’s current minimum wage is actually only $6.15 per hour, but because federal minimum wage law prevails, most workers are entitled to a minimum of $7.25 per hour.) The Senate bill would raise the minimum wage to just $7.75 per hour by 2015, with no inflation adjustment.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton has expressed support for a minimum wage of $9.00 or higher, noting that he “want[s] work to pay – pay off for the family and pay for our society. That means someone working full-time needs to make enough money to bring them up to the poverty level.” I couldn’t agree more – and by boosting annual wages for a full-time minimum wage worker from $14,500 to $19,000 by 2015, the House bill would allow a mom with two children to lift her family out of poverty. In contrast, under the Senate bill, a full-time minimum wage worker would earn only $15,500 annually by 2015 – still about $3,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of three.

Members of Minnesota’s House and Senate have only a week left to negotiate a compromise between the two bills before the legislative session ends. Reaching agreement may not be an easy feat; indeed, just last month, Hawaii’s House and Senate were unable to reconcile two minimum wage bills, and the session ended with no minimum wage increase at all. But thousands of women and men in Minnesota are counting on their legislators to give them the raise they deserve – one that looks a lot more like the House’s proposal than the Senate’s.