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posted by janrinok on Monday December 08 2014, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
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

 
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  • (Score: 1) by terryk30 on Tuesday December 09 2014, @11:38AM

    by terryk30 (1753) on Tuesday December 09 2014, @11:38AM (#124140)

    Up front I don't know enough about economics, but having said that I'd still like to know why a minimum wage couldn't be regarded as a cost like that of a raw material - e.g. since all restaurants need to pay more or less a certain nonzero amount for ground beef or all manufacturers a nonzero amount for electricity, they just shrug and pay the invoice along with all the others. Although from time to time they may adjust their efficient use of that resource and/or negotiate a slightly better price, they know that there's a level below which it just can't go - but they don't get indignant about it, they just get on with things.