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Toledo
Blade...
Ohio,
7 other states set to hike
minimum wage
December 29, 2011
NEW
YORK -- Eight states -- including
Ohio -- will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under
state laws
that require wage floors to keep pace with inflation.
San
Francisco, one of the few cities
that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising
wages
for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first
big city
in the country to require companies to pay more than $10 an hour.
The
increases in Ohio, Arizona,
Colorado, Florida, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington will be 28
cents to
37 cents an hour, according to the National Employment Law Project.
That is an
extra $582 to $770 a year for a full-time minimum-wage worker and
resets the
states’ minimum wages to $7.64 to $9.04 an hour.
At
the high end is Washington state,
which will become the first state in the nation to set its minimum wage
above
$9 an hour. The federal wage floor for most workers is $7.25 an hour.
In
Ohio, the minimum wage will be
$7.70 an hour, up from $7.40.
About
1 million minimum-wage employees
will be affected by increases in the eight states, according to the
Economic
Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. An additional
400,000 who
make just above minimum wage also are likely to get raises because many
employers adjust their pay distribution for all employees when a new
minimum
goes into effect.
Most
of the minimum-wage employees
affected in these states are women, over the age of 20 and white,
according to
the institute’s analysis of Labor Department data.
A
national minimum wage was first
enacted during the Great Depression and has been raised sporadically by
Congress rather than being automatically indexed to price changes.
Adjusting
for inflation, the federal wage floor was highest in 1968.
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