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: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday December 09 2014, @12:02AM
An private organization that relies on the government to provide for their workers is inherently parasitical in nature and those welfare queens SHOULD go out of business. As a nation we're better off without them distorting the free market.
And in these days, when every thing goes through computers nearly instantaneously, this situation would seem to be solvable in short order.
The extent to which the government has to subsidize an employee to bring them up to some standard, could be charged back to the employer at some rate designed and calculated to induce higher wages and full time employment vs permanent part time.
Especially when the entire staff is made up of part time employees given enough hours such that the employer does not have to pay various government mandated benefits.
However, your statement...
An private organization that relies on the government to provide for their workers is inherently parasitical in nature and those welfare queens SHOULD go out of business.
...just doesn't fit with the rest of your post.
It was the government that created these loop-holes and incentives to keep hours low and escape paying the full burden. If there wasn't a financial incentive to hire 6 half time employees to avoid paying 3 full time employees, companies wouldn't do it.
Walmart is simply doing what is economically the most expedient and financially responsible thing to do: Minimizing costs. They are doing exactly what the government enables them to do.
[I don't discount the possibility that walmart and friends lobbied the government strongly in favor of these provisions, or that congress didn't fill their own pockets in passing them.]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.