Publication
Governor Wolf’s budget includes a plan to raise the current $7.25 per hour minimum wage to $12 in July 2021, followed by 50-cent increases yearly until July 2027, where it will be set at $15 per hour. This proposal also aims to eliminate the tipped minimum wage, allowing currently tipped workers to join the climb to $15 starting with $12 in July 2021. In this report, we outline the demographic characteristics of workers who will benefit from this plan to increase the minimum wage.
On November 3, voters will have the opportunity to decide whether 2.5 million working Floridians receive a wage increase: Amendment 2 seeks to gradually increase the state minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026. As with all constitutional amendments, 60 percent of voters must vote in favor of Amendment 2 for it to become law.
Using the minimum wage simulation model developed by Economic Policy Institute, this report finds that by 2026, the proposed $15 minimum wage would:
- increase wages for 2.5 million Floridians, over 26 percent of the workforce;
- help lift households out of poverty;
- bring workers of all ages closer to a living wage;
- benefit Florida’s service sector workers the most; and
- reduce pay inequities experienced by women and people of color.
The coronavirus pandemic has shone a light on Maryland communities’ deep reliance on the workers who keep families fed, care for aging adults, and maintain sanitary public spaces. Yet these same workers too often take home wages that cannot support a family, let alone compensate for the daily risks their jobs require. As policymakers respond to the growing economic crisis, they must recognize the need to support the essential workers who support the rest of us. This means strengthening basic protections like the minimum wage and the right to earn paid sick days—not walking back the promises they have already made. Freezing Maryland’s minimum wage at its current, inadequate level would harm the very people now holding up our communities, weaken Maryland’s economy, and ultimately make us all worse off:
- Freezing the minimum wage would cost a typical low-wage worker more than $7,000 in lost wages by 2025, even as basics like housing and health care continue to become more unaffordable. A proposed—though legally dubious—two-year freeze would cost a typical worker well over $14,000 by 2026.
- Freezing the minimum wage would do outsized harm to women and workers of color who are overrepresented in low-wage jobs.
- Freezing the minimum wage would depress consumer spending and weaken Maryland’s economy for years to come.
Further, corporate lobbyists’ recent claims about ignore the best research on the economics of the minimum wage.
Everyone in Virginia working a full-time job should be paid enough to provide for their family. However, for many this is not the case. Nearly two-thirds of Virginia families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold have at least one adult who is working, yet they are paid too little to make ends meet. Virginia policymakers could raise the wages of working people in Virginia and help families across the commonwealth by raising Virginia’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024, closing loopholes that currently exclude many Black and Latinx workers, and making sure Virginia’s wage laws are fairly enforced.
The federal minimum wage has eroded significantly since the late 1960s compared to the typical cost of living, median wages, and the economic productivity of working people. Virginia’s current minimum wage, set at $7.25 an hour to match the federal minimum, is the lowest in the country compared to the typical cost of living in the state, according to OxFam’s State of Working America report. The choice to maintain this inadequate minimum that leaves many families behind is a part of a pattern in Virginia of policymakers failing to act to protect working families and instead too often erecting barriers to success, particularly for working families of color. This erosion in the minimum wage has particularly harmed Black and Latinx working people. This is because working people of color in Virginia are more likely than white workers in Virginia to be stuck in low-wage occupations due to ongoing job discrimination, lack of educational opportunities, and other barriers that white people in Virginia are less likely to have faced.