Minimum Wage

It looks like Arizona legislators are in the mood to listen to their citizens this week! In more relieving news from the state, the sponsor of the ballot initiative that would have ended the state’s current policy of indexing the minimum wage for inflation has withdrawn the bill, citing polling data indicating that the measure would be defeated by voters. Read more »

Well, it looks like we can breathe a sigh of relief when it comes to Florida’s recent attempt to slash wages for tipped workers. The Florida bill I blogged about earlier this week that would have cut the state’s tipped minimum wage by more than half has died in the state Senate. This is one death I’m happy to celebrate.

Unfortunately, the update from Arizona is not good. Yesterday, the Arizona House passed HCR 2056. The legislature has changed the ballot initiative since it was first introduced, but it has just changed how it would propose to cut the minimum wage. The initiative has been amended to remove the provisions cutting the minimum wage for tipped workers and young workers specifically, but language has been added that would end the current law policy of indexing of the minimum wage for inflation. This means that the state minimum wage, which is now slightly higher than the federal minimum ($7.65 an hour rather than $7.25), will only go up when Congress raises the federal minimum – and that’s not often. In fact, if the federal minimum wage were keeping pace with inflation, it would be more than $10 per hour, rather than the current level of $7.25.  Read more »

News outlets across the country, including ESPN, The Nation, and the Chicago Sun Times, have been covering the Joseph Williams’ story - a University of Virginia football player who joined several other students on a hunger strike organized by the Living Wage Campaign.

Williams’ hunger strike protested the $7.25 hourly wage of some university employees. At the intersection of sports and politics, the story is about race and class, but it’s also about gender, an angle largely neglected in media coverage of the strike.

“As one of four children supported by a single mother, I have experienced many period of economic hardship in my life,” wrote Williams in an essay on reasons for striking. “On a personal level, this cause is one that hits very close to home.”

He is not alone. Thirty-four percent of families headed by working black single mothers were living in poverty in 2010.

Williams specifically identified women and African Americans as most of the university employees affected by low wages, acknowledging one full-time female employee at the university who was unable to pay rent and forced to go without electricity for three months. When asked why it was important for him to take this stand, Williams named two women workers he knows personally who are “being marginalized and exploited.” Read more »

Recently we’ve been happy to report on some good news about the minimum wage, including the Department of Labor’s proposed regulations to extend federal minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers (there is still time to submit comments to show your support for these workers), and the Delaware Senate’s passage of legislation to raise the minimum wage in the state to $8.25.

Today, unfortunately, I bring you grim news about two states that are proposing to cut the minimum wage for tipped workers and younger workers. Legislators in Florida and Arizona have proposed new measures that would make their already low tipped minimum cash wages even lower.

In Florida, Senate Bill 2106 would cut the state tipped minimum cash wage from $4.65 to the federal minimum of just $2.13 (which, in addition to being bad policy, may also violate the state constitution). In Arizona, the House Committee on Commerce has approved a ballot initiative, HCR 2056, which would lower the state’s tipped minimum cash wage from $4.65 to $2.53.

The Arizona proposal would also slash the minimum wage for workers under the age of 20 in part time or temporary jobs by up to $3.00, from $7.65 to $4.65. Read more »

If you follow our blog, you know that the Department of Labor has proposed a rule that would extend basic labor protections – minimum wage and overtime protection – to home care workers who have been excluded under an exemption for “companionship services.” The Fair Labor Standards Act was amended in 1974 to include domestic service workers, but millions of home care workers never got to enjoy the basic protections included in that law. Instead, these professional workers (about 90 percent of whom are women) have been put in the same category as teenaged babysitters or neighbors who stop by to check in on an elderly person. As a result, the home care industry has a very high turnover rate – estimated to range from 44 to 65 percent each year – which diminishes quality and continuity of care for clients and costs the industry an estimated $2 billion annually. It has been almost 40 years since other domestic service workers gained wage and hour protections. Home care workers shouldn’t have to wait anymore!

Unfortunately, many companies in the over-80-billion-dollar home care industry are working hard to prevent home care workers from receiving basic labor protections. The industry has found an ally in some Members of Congress who petitioned the Department of Labor to extend the public comment period for the proposed rule – even though the Department announced almost 2 years ago that it was looking into the issue and over 5000 comments had already been received. The House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections is going to hold a hearing on this issue on March 7. Although the official witness list hasn’t been announced, we anticipate that the industry will be well represented and we know what their witnesses are likely to say: that the rule would be too expensive and that it would hurt, not help, home care workers. Let me take a moment to debunk those myths right now. 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 »

Here’s a little bit of good news for the new year: more than one million low-wage workers got a raise on January 1, when the minimum wage increased in the eight states that index their minimum wage for inflation. In each of these states (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington), women make up a majority of the workers who will see their paychecks increase this month.  An adjustment for inflation also increased the minimum wage in San Francisco to $10.24 per hour, making it the first large city in the country to require hourly pay above $10.

However, these jurisdictions represent the exception rather than the rule. While another 10 states, the District of Columbia, and some other localities have minimum wages that are set higher than the federal minimum wage, most of their minimum wage rates are fixed and don’t keep pace with inflation. The minimum wage is still below $9.00 an hour in every state but Washington (where it just rose to $9.04/hour). Worst of all, in more than half the states, the minimum wage remains at the federal level, which is just $7.25 an hour.

As the New York Times editorial page highlighted, it’s past time for the federal government to set a higher standard for the states. A woman working full time, year round at the current federal minimum wage will earn just $14,500 annually – that’s more than $3,000 below the federal poverty line for a mother with two children. The value of the federal minimum wage has declined over time; if it had kept pace with inflation since 1968 (when the wage was at its highest mark), it would now be $10.39 per hour. The federal minimum wage for tipped workers is lower still; since 1991, it has been set at just $2.13 an hour, providing an annual base wage of only $4,260 for tipped employees working full time, year round. Read more »