'Every little bit helps': Minimum wage to rise in 24 states as a movement toward $15 an hour builds

Paul Davidson | USA TODAY

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Several years ago, a $15-an-hour minimum wage was the pipe dream of a national coalition of striking fast-food workers.

Now, it’s increasingly becoming a reality across the country, with significant gains expected in 2020.

The number of cities and counties with at least a $15 pay floor is set to double next year to 32, as Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and South San Francisco, along with about a dozen other California cities, adopt the benchmark, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project provided exclusively to USA TODAY. They’ll join cities such as New York, Seattle and San Francisco that are already members of the $15 club.

More broadly, 24 states and 48 cities and counties will raise their minimum wages in 2020 – a record 72 jurisdictions, the worker advocacy group’s study says. Most will occur on or about Jan. 1.

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“They’re feeling they can’t rely on the federal government to raise wages, so they’re doing it on their own,” says Yanett Lathrop, a researcher and policy analyst for NELP.

In Kansas City, Missouri, Milly Hobbs, 28, earns $9 an hour working full-time at McDonald’s, an amount she says forces her to share a three-bedroom apartment with five relatives and friends, including her mother. She says she spends about $20 a week on groceries, allowing her just one meal a day, and makes do with one pair of socks and two pairs of tattered pants. Her cellphone was recently turned off for nonpayment. And she doesn’t have the money to replace her one-armed eyeglass frames.

“It’s been very difficult,” she says. “And this time of year it’s even more stressful.”

A relatively small 45-cent increase in her hourly pay to $9.45 starting Jan. 1 should help her buy new frames, pay her phone bill and start saving toward a car purchase.

“Every little bit helps,” she says. “It’s a start, but it’s not enough to live on.”

The federal minimum has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. In July, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed legislation to raise it to $15 by 2025, but the Republican majority Senate has refused to debate the bill, the latest chapter in a years-long standoff between the parties over the issue.

Twenty-nine states, with 61% of the U.S. workforce, now have pay floors above the federal government’s, according to NELP.

On or about Jan. 1, 21 states and 26 cities and counties will lift their base pay, including California, New York, Illinois, Maine, Michigan and Massachusetts. Most will be relatively large increases as part of significant hikes that are being phased in over several years following legislation or ballot initiatives.

Even some states with low pay floors are taking action. New Mexico’s wage base will rise from $7.50 to $9 and Illinois’ from $8.25 to $9.25 as both states raise their thresholds for the first time in a decade. Missouri is raising its minimum from $8.60 to $9.45 in a second step toward reaching $12 by 2023.

There will also be small, annual cost-of-living increases in seven states, such as bumps from $8.46 to $8.56 in Florida and from $8.55 to $8.70 in Ohio. Twenty-six cities and counties, many of them in California, also will raise their minimums, including 14 cost-of-living increases.

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Later in 2020, another three states – Connecticut, Nevada and Oregon – and 22 localities will raise their minimum wages, the NELP report shows.

But the most striking development is the growth in the number of jurisdictions headed to a $15 pay floor. A couple of years ago, it was just California and New York. Now, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut are also on their way to $15. Nearly a third of the U.S. workforce lives in states climbing to $15 over the next few years, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

And along with many cities in California, Chicago, Denver and St. Paul, Minnesota, are moving to that benchmark. Lathrop credits the awareness generated by Fight for $15, an alliance of fast-food and other low-paid workers that has staged walkouts across the country since 2012 and are backed by the Service Employees International Union.

“The Fight for $15 has really been making inroads,” Lathrop says.

At the same time, 21 states still have minimum wages at the federal government’s $7.25 or are subject to the U.S. standard. In several of those states, localities such as Madison, Wisconsin; Louisville, Kentucky; and Polk County, Iowa, have adopted their own higher minimums only to be blocked by state legislatures, according to the NELP report. Some cities in states with higher pay bases, such as Miami and Denver, similarly have seen their efforts to rise above the thresholds preempted by the states.

But Colorado lawmakers repealed the state’s wage preemption law last May, allowing Denver to pass legislation that will bring its minimum to $15.87 by 2022. Similar repeal efforts are underway in 12 other states, including Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas, all of whose pay floors are mired at $7.25.

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Michael Saltsman, research director for the Employment Policies Institute, which is backed by the restaurant industry, says a $15 minimum wage has led to restaurant closings in Seattle and San Francisco. Noting that companies such as Target, Walmart and Amazon have raised their own pay bases, Saltsman says the state laws, and an increase in the federal minimum, are unnecessary.

A Congressional Budget Office study published in July found that a $15 federal minimum wage would increase pay for 17 million workers who earn less than that and possibly another 10 million who earn slightly more. It would cause 1.3 million other workers to lose their jobs, according to the study’s median estimate.