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Calif., La. Legislatures Vote to Increase Minimum Wage |
California legislators are ready to send Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) legislation to boost the state’s minimum wage by $1 to $7.75 an hour and to protect it against inflation. Now Schwarzenegger has a choice to make, says Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation:
The real question before the governor is this: Will he make a token improvement to pull up his polling numbers? Or will he provide a real fix for poverty forced upon minimum wage families in California?
Schwarzenegger says he wants to raise the minimum wage but refuses to protect its value by indexing it. Last month, in a bid to get around the Legislature’s move, Schwarzenegger asked a state commission that had been out of business since 2003 to raise the minimum wage without the indexing provision.
The Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC), which is charged with setting and monitoring various workplace rules and conditions, including the minimum wage, was defunded in 2003 by the Legislature after it refused several times to raise the minimum wage. But Schwarzenegger—who has vetoed two previous minimum wage bills that included indexing—revived the IWC, which is set to meet today to consider his proposal.
Pulaski told The San Diego Union-Tribune:
This is 100 percent politics on the governor’s part. This is an election year, and he is terrified of having the reputation of having vetoed a minimum wage increase three years in a row.
On May 30, the federation filed its own petition to the IWC asking it to raise the minimum wage with the indexing, but it’s not clear if the commission will consider the request.
Pulaski says:
The minimum wage is too important to depend on election year politics. It must be taken permanently out of the political mix….Indexing makes sense for workers and for business. For workers, it is a lifejacket allowing them to stay financially afloat. It means their wages do not lose their purchasing power even as their productivity climbs, as has happened in recent years. For employers, indexing means they have predictable labor costs in future years.
Both the state Assembly and Senate have approved nearly identical bills and are expected to iron out the differences and send the wage bill to the governor’s desk.
The California drive to raise the minimum wage is part of a larger “America Needs a Raise” campaign to raise the minimum wage, led by the AFL-CIO and Working America. The campaign includes work in nearly 20 states, including pushes for ballot initiatives in four states to boost their minimum wage past the $5.15 an hour federal level where it has been stalled since 1997.
In Louisiana on May 31, the state Senate approved a bill to raise the minimum wage there from $5.15 an hour to $6.15 an hour.
“All the states with higher minimum wage are doing better than Louisiana. People who work at universities and charity hospitals make $5.15 an hour? That’s unconscionable. We’re trying to raise their standard of living,” says state Sen. Don Cravins (D).
The Louisiana bill now goes to the state House.
Recent studies in Florida and other states where the minimum wage has increased show jobs aren’t lost and the economy benefits.
See our most recent coverage of state minimum wage actions, here, here, here and here.
State action, though, does not absolve Congress. Click here to urge your U.S. representative to sign a discharge petition to bring the minimum wage increase to the House floor, and click here to become a citizen co-sponsor of the U.S. Senate bill to raise the wage.
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