About 3,500 workers on Guam stand to receive a pay raise after Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero signed a bill to increase the minimum wage from $8.25 to $9.25 over a two-year period.

The first increase, from $8.25 to $8.75, will take effect on March 1, 2020. The next 50-cent raise will take effect March 1, 2021.

Leon Guerrero said the increase will provide Guam’s working people with the means to provide more for their families.

Apprenticeship program extended

“It’s not just about raising the minimum wage and giving them buying power, which is good for our economy. It is also about moving them onto higher career pathways,” the governor said, referring to Sen. Régine Biscoe Lee's Bill 128-35. Lee's bill would extend the Guam Registered Apprenticeship Program for five years and the governor signed it into law on Monday, too.

“We want to give more support to programs like this, to give our people more opportunities to grow and thrive on our island,” Lee said.

Without the measure, the apprenticeship program would have expired in four months.

“Since the start of our administration, about 1,000 people have been placed in apprenticeship or pre-apprenticeship programs, often paid at rates higher than minimum wage,” Leon Guerrero said.

The governor called the two bills “very good legislation.”

“I think an educated workforce is going to be the answer to our struggle here and our challenges here,” she said.

Public servants happy

Sen. Joe San Augustin, who introduced the minimum wage bill, said he wanted to thank the governor for giving the people a “hand up and not a handout by signing the minimum wage bill today."

Speaker Tina Muña Barnes said the measures would raise the quality of life for the minimum wage earners and their families.

Guam Department of Labor Director David Dell’Isola said he could not think of two better bills being signed at a better time. These new laws open career paths for minimum wage earners and others, he said.

The governor signed Bill 136-35 and 128-35 into Public Laws 35-38 and 35-39, respectively.

Business owners not so much

The island's largest business organization has opposed the minimum wage increase.

“The Guam Chamber of Commerce has never been supportive of increasing minimum wage and they talk about letting the market forces do that, but if you look back, historically, market forces don’t do that. … It always comes from a government mandate, either federal, state or our territory, so I’m not so convinced that market forces will increase the wages and that’s why government steps in,” Leon Guerrero said.

A recent study by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis under the U.S. Department of Commerce showed Guam’s real gross domestic product, which is a measure of the size of the island's economy, dipped by about 0.3 percent in 2018 – a first in at least a decade. Between 2008 and 2017, Guam posted growths of between 0.25% and more than 2% each year.