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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: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 10 2014, @06:15PM
This assumes a practically infinite number of skilled jobs are available. Not everyone can be a theoretical physicist or software developer, and SOMEONE has to flip those burgers.
There are more college grads than ever working minimum wage jobs today. You expect me to believe that half a million people just spontaneously decided that they didn't feel like doing anything with their sixteen+ years of education?
Ideally we should be looking to reduce the labor supply by 10-20% so that the problem fixes itself through supply and demand. I think moving to a 4 day work week would be just about perfect. But either way we've gotta do SOMETHING to raise wages. Because why the hell am I paying the wage of some Walmart workers, when I haven't set foot inside a Walmart in nearly a decade? The way it is now, even if you go out of your way to only shop at businesses that pay a fair living wage, you're still paying thousands of dollars in welfare to corporations that won't. We're forced at gunpoint to pad their profit margins. Profits that they then spend to buy our politicians and take away more of our rights...