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from the consumers-with-more-money-to-spend dept.
NPR (formerly National Public Radio) reports:
By a 44-5 vote, Chicago's City Council set a minimum-wage target of $13 an hour, to be reached by the middle of 2019. The move comes after Illinois passed a nonbinding advisory last month that calls for the state to raise its minimum pay level to $10 by the start of next year.
The current minimum wage in Chicago and the rest of Illinois is $8.25. Under the ordinance, the city's minimum wage will rise to $10 by next July and go up in increments each summer thereafter.
[...]The bill states that "rising inflation has outpaced the growth in the minimum wage, leaving the true value of lllinois' current minimum wage of $8.25 per hour 32 percent below the 1968 level of $10.71 per hour (in 2013 dollars)."
It also says nearly a third of Chicago's workers, or some 410,000 people, currently make $13 an hour or less.
[...][In the 2014] midterm elections, voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota approved binding referendums that raise their states' wage floor above the federal minimum.
Media Matters for America notes that The Chicago Tribune's coverage tried to trot out the *job-killer* dead horse once again, to which the response was
According to a March 2014 report(PDF) prepared for the Seattle Income Inequality Advisory Committee titled "Local Minimum Wage laws: Impacts on Workers, Families, and Businesses", city-wide minimum wage increases in multiple locations--Albuquerque, NM; Santa Fe, NM; San Francisco, CA; and Washington, DC--produced "no discernible negative effects on employment" and no measurable job shift from metropolitan to suburban areas.
Related:
Seattle Approves $15 Minimum Wage
Mayor's Minimum Wage Veto Overridden by San Diego City Council
States That Raised Their Minimum Wages Are Experiencing Faster Job Growth
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @08:56PM
better qualified applicants would be willing to perform the jobs remaining in the city
Unless you do not even have the means to pay to move somewhere else.
Min wage laws long term hurts the very people it is trying to help.
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/ [steshaw.org]
http://steshaw.org/economics-in-one-lesson/chap19p1.html [steshaw.org]
There is only one cure for low wages. That is more jobs, not limiting jobs people are willing to offer. Jobs are a commodity like bubble gum and socks. Scarcity and demand drive the price market for jobs the same as socks. You do not pay 500 dollars for a stick of gum. Why? Because it is common. The same with jobs. The more people than there are jobs the less demand there is for them. Less demand means less pay. You can game the system short term (min caps) because short term the market is sort of inelastic. But long term that never works. Within 2-3 years business owners *will* adjust. Either by going out of business or hiring less people.