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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 08 2014, @11:36PM
Why aren't wages keeping up with inflation?
In a word: Capitalism.
In the Cold War days, there was a joke:
Under Capitalism, man exploits man; under Communism, it is the inverse.
This demonstrates a misunderstanding of what Communism actually is.
It also shows that anyone can call anything by any name (Totalitarianism and State Capitalism with a fraudulent veneer).
Now, the part about Capitalism was right on the money.
French economist Thomas Piketty researched the previous 250 years of Capitalism and recently published his 696-page tome. [wikipedia.org]
He concluded that Capitalism results in ever-increasing concentrations of wealth which then translate to political power.
This is an unstable system and periodically the undamped system tears itself apart (French Revolution, numerous financial panics and depressions).
Economics professor Richard Wolff thinks Piketty identified the cause correctly (Capitalism) but thinks he got the solution all wrong (wealth tax). [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [redfortyeight.com]
(FDR's 94 percent billionaires tax worked for a while--until the New Deal was disassembled piece by piece by the folks with enough wealth to buy off the political system.)
The correct permanent solution, however, is to disassemble the unstable system and replace it with something more stable.
On a small-ish scale, the Mondragon worker-owned cooperative in the north of Spain (currently ~6000 workers) has had this figured out since 1956.
In northern Italy there are numerous worker-owned cooperatives that are also successful.
On a larger scale, northern Europe has figured out how to do this via a form of Socialism.
Venezuela and Ecuador are moving in a similar direction.
A guy in a tech forum I frequent has in his sig:
It takes a lot of money to create poverty.
Truer words were never spoken.
-- gewg_