Some Good News: On New Year’s Day, Many Americans Got a Raise
For nearly half of the USA, the minimum wage increased on January 1st. Not even the trickle-down business lobby could turn that into bad news.
Happy Minimum Wage Day! Every January 1st, new minimum wage increases go into effect in states and cities around the country. As USA Today notes, 2021 delivered a bumper crop of higher wages for workers: “Twenty states and 32 cities and counties…are set to raise their minimum wages on or about New Year’s Day.” The Hill explains what those raises look like: “New Mexico will see the largest jump, adding $1.50 to its hourly minimum and bringing it up to $10.50. Arkansas, California, Illinois and New Jersey will each increase their minimum wages by $1.”
Here in Washington state, the wage increased to $13.69 per hour at midnight on January 1st. And because they’re tied to the state minimum wage, Washington’s exciting new overtime regulations are starting to take effect, too. That means that if you’re a salaried worker for a small business of 50 or fewer employees who earns less than 1.5 times the state minimum wage (or $42,712.80 a year), your employer must pay you time and a half for every hour worked over 40 hours per week. Salaried employees at larger businesses who earn less than 1.75 times the minimum wage (or just shy of $50,000 per year) will likewise be paid time and a half for overtime work.
This is great news! Income inequality in this country is out of control, and common-sense minimum wage and overtime laws help return some of the $50 trillion in wages that the wealthiest .01 percent of Americans have taken from working Americans over the past 40 years. And unlike the hoarded wealth of the richest Americans, the money that these workers earn through increased wages will be spent in their communities, creating more jobs.
Of course, Minimum Wage Day has its downsides. I’ve written before about the anti-minimum-wage stories that appear in media outlets during the first week of January. Trickle-down editorial boards love to drag out the same tired debunked Chamber of Commerce talking points on the wage. One perfect example of this kind of hackery: a CBS affiliate in San Diego warned that 2021’s minimum wage increase means “businesses across California will have to buckle down once again to keep their heads above water,” even though a huge and growing body of evidence proves that minimum wage increases don’t contribute to job losses and business closures.
One particularly awful trickle-down talking point that lobbyists circulated this Minimum Wage Day was that increases should be suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic. USA Today’s Paul Davidson characterized this COVID-era anti-wage argument by saying that “small businesses [are] struggling to survive amid plunging revenue and a new round of state shutdowns aimed at curtailing the latest coronavirus spike” and increased wages might be the thing to push some businesses over the edge. Citing the pandemic, chambers of commerce across the country fought to suspend wage increases; to date, those attempts have failed in every state but Virginia.
These calls for suspensions are disgraceful. Big corporations have long fought wage increases by hiding behind a veil of concern for small businesses, and this is simply the latest pandemic-era twist on that old tune. It’s true that federal and local governments should be doing much more to help small businesses stay in a state of suspended animation until enough Americans have been vaccinated to safely reopen the economy, but killing consumer demand by taking wages away from workers isn’t going to help small businesses stay open. And you can bet that the same people who proposed suspending wage increases due to coronavirus will come back with another ridiculous reason to keep those wages down the next time Minimum Wage Day comes around.
But let’s not dwell too much on the negative. As I noted in July, the good news is that recent media coverage has vastly improved over Minimum Wage Days past. Almost every news story I could find on or around Minimum Wage Day did a decent job of explaining why raising the minimum wage is so important. If reporters quoted an anti-wage corporate lobbyist with their latest pandemic fear-mongering talking points in the pieces, those reporters also talked to an expert who explained that raising the wage is vital for everyone — not just minimum wage workers. (Though I still wish more journalists would talk to the workers actually receiving the minimum-wage raises. Maybe that should be the media’s resolution for Minimum Wage Day 2022.)
For the most part, in local coverage and in splashy pieces in big media outlets, the truth prevailed. America got a raise this week. That’s great news for everyone.
