- August 19, 2019
- Jacob Vigil, MSW
Half of all workers in New Mexico cannot earn paid sick leave and have to either go to work when they or a family member is sick or stay home and lose pay. This is the highest rate in the nation. Because the federal government has no paid sick leave policy, several states and municipalities have enacted paid sick leave policies but paid sick leave legislation for New Mexico stalled during the most recent legislative session. The report looks at which sectors (among other employer demographics) are most and least likely to offer paid sick leave. The report concludes that statewide paid sick leave and paid family leave laws would go far to ensuring all New Mexico workers and their families have opportunities to lead healthier lives and are crucial to building the strong workforce our state needs to support a thriving economy.
With all of the claims about how great the economy is right now, the data shows that the average Kentuckian’s wages remained flat in 2018, continuing the trend of nearly the last two decades. Unemployment is certainly lower than it’s been in a long time and the job market continues to tighten in parts of the state, but Kentucky workers are not experiencing the kind of wage growth and improvement in standard of living that such an economy should afford.
Wrapped into his 2019 budget proposal, Governor Wolf has proposed to raise the minimum wage in July 2019 to $12/hour, with yearly 50-cent increases until it reaches $15/hour in 2025. After 2025, the minimum wage would be adjusted for inflation. Also included in this plan is to eliminate the separate tipped minimum wage of $2.83/hour—tipped workers would earn $12 in July 2019 and would follow the same scheduled changes each year.
This increase is needed to make up for the declining value of the minimum wage over time. Figure 1 shows the minimum wage relative to the median wage for full-time, full-year workers in Pennsylvania over time. In 1968, the minimum wage was 51% of the median wage in Pennsylvania; the minimum was $1.60 compared to the median of $3.15. As you can see by the dark blue line, this value has decreased steadily over time. Today, the minimum wage is only 30% of the median wage in Pennsylvania. Doing nothing and maintaining a $7.25 minimum wage will result in this falling to 26.3% by 2025. Alternatively, Governor Wolf’s plan to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2025 will bring the minimum back to about half of the median wage, where it was in the late 1960s.
Everyone deserves fair pay for the hours they work, and the freedom to have a personal life away from the job. The more we work, the less time we have for ourselves, our families, and our communities. That’s why we have federal and state overtime laws, which require that most workers be paid time-and-a-half for every hour they work over 40 in a given week. It’s a straightforward bargain: when workers give up scarce personal time for their job, that time becomes more valuable. Employers then have to balance their demand for more hours from their employees with the increased costs of such a demand.
Unfortunately, this bargain has broken down when it comes to millions of modestly paid salaried workers across the country, including hundreds of thousands in Massachusetts. Almost all workers paid by the hour are automatically covered by overtime protection. For workers paid a salary, however, weak, outdated, and confusing overtime laws make it easy for employers to require them to work 50, 60, or more hours in a week without paying them anything more than if they had worked 40 hours. When this happens, salaried workers end up sacrificing their personal time—for free.