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California Strikes Deal to Hike Minimum Wage to $15
Governor Jerry Brown announces agreement between lawmakers and union leaders.
The battle to raise the minimum wage to $15 is over—at least in California.
Over March 28, California lawmakers reached a deal to raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022. This move signals the biggest advance yet in a campaign to increase pay for low-income workers.
The debate has long been reverberated in the Democratic presidential contest and in cities across the country. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator running for the Democratic nomination, has made a $15 federal minimum wage a central plank in his campaign. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, has called for a $12 federal minimum wage. Minimum wage is currently at $7.25 an hour.
Under the new deal in California, the wage, which was raised to $10 an hour on January 1, would increase incrementally to $15 over the next six years. Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees will have until 2023 to hit $15.
According to The New York Times, two factors make California’s plan such a pioneering step: the size of the increase and the size of the state. About 600,000 of California’s 1.6 million manufacturing workers earn less than $15 an hour—that’s by far the largest block of affected manufacturing workers. It’s also a key metric because it points to how the size of California’s increase reaches out to different employment sectors than a smaller increase would.
“This is a very big deal,” said Paul K. Sonn, the general counsel to the National Employment Law Project, a national research and advocacy group on wages. “It would mean a raise for one of every three workers in the state.”
The movement has gained traction in a dozen other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. Last week, the major of Washington proposed raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2020.
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