Minimum Wage: The States Get It. [View All]

[Career Prole]

From BusinessWeekOnline, where they endorsed Kerry for President as well.

Commentary: Minimum Wage: The States Get It

By Aaron Bernstein

Florida Governor Jeb Bush helped to deliver 52% of his state's votes for his brother on Nov. 2, but that didn't stop fully 72% of voters there from backing a GOP-unfriendly ballot initiative: raising the minimum wage. The popular measure set a state wage floor of $6.15 an hour, a buck higher than the federal level, which hasn't been lifted since 1997. It also pegs the state's new minimum to inflation, so that the lowest-paid workers will get automatic increases each year to keep their purchasing power in line with consumer price hikes.

The initiative, to which Governor Bush offered only tepid opposition, makes Florida the 13th state to lose patience with the federal government and set its own higher minimum. It's also the third, following Washington and Oregon, to index its minimum wage to inflation. Both of these ideas are long overdue and should be emulated by Congress and other states.

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Certainly, there are few credible reasons left to oppose an increase of the federal $5.15 an hour. That sum gives a full-time worker barely more than $10,000 a year, despite a family poverty level that has climbed to $18,600. Indeed, the federal minimum was 40% higher in 1968, or $8.50 in today's dollars. So lifting it by a dollar or two wouldn't even come close to restoring low-wage workers' purchasing power back to where it was more than 25 years ago.

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