Delaware

There’s a lot to report on the minimum wage today, but I’ll start with the biggest news: the New York legislature has approved the state’s 2013-2014 budget, which includes a minimum wage increase. Specifically, the minimum wage will rise from $7.25 to $8.00 per hour on December 31, 2013, to $8.75 one year later, and $9.00 on December 31, 2015.

This is good news for minimum wage workers in New York, nearly two-thirds of whom are women. But the phased-in minimum wage increase in the budget is weaker than the increase that the state Assembly passed just a few weeks ago, which would have raised New York’s minimum wage to $9.00 per hour in one step in January 2014, then indexed the wage annually to keep up with inflation. The budget also drops a provision in the Assembly-passed bill that would have raised the minimum cash wage for tipped food service workers from $5.00 to $6.21 per hour, but it does provide a path to an increase for these workers by authorizing the labor commissioner to have a wage board examine the adequacy of New York’s tipped minimum wage, then issue an order to raise the wage. Read more »

Last week I wrote about a proposed minimum wage increase that had passed through the Delaware Senate Labor Committee. This week, I am happy to report that the bill has cleared the Senate! The bill would raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $8.25 by January 1, 2013. This increase is needed and welcome—but it’s still not enough to bring the wages of a single mother with two kids working full time, year round, above the poverty line. 

Women would especially benefit from an increase in the federal minimum wage because nearly two-thirds of the workers who made at or below the federal minimum wage in 2010 are women. And the recovery has been especially slow for women, who, by the end of 2011, had gained only 3% of the jobs added since the recovery started in June 2009. Read more »

This week, the Delaware Senate labor committee approved a bill that would raise the minimum wage in the state by $1 over the next two years, from the federal level of $7.25 to $8.25. This increase in the minimum wage is a step in the right direction towards stimulating Delaware’s economy and helping women workers.

This increase would be very beneficial for women who account for two-thirds of individuals who made at or below the federal minimum wage in 2010. As our Julie Vogtman points out, increasing the minimum wage will also contribute to closing the wage gap between men and women. In Delaware, the typical woman working full time, year round in 2010 earned only 81 percent of what her male counterpart earned. Read more »

Last week the winners of the first round of the Early Learning Challenge grant competition were announced.

The 9 states selected to receive the grant awards (California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Washington) have laid out comprehensive, collaborative strategies to achieve stronger early learning systems that increase low-income children’s access to high-quality early care and education.

We hope that the states’ efforts will include steps to address continuing gaps in their child care assistance policies. Because according to our analysis of data from our recent report, many of these states are falling short in providing the help low-income families need to afford reliable, high-quality care. Be sure to check out the highlights of our analysis here! Read more »