Allegheny County Council voted Tuesday to increase the minimum wage for people employed by the county.

The vote was 10-4 in favor of an ordinance that sets a pay floor for all hourly county employees, including full-time, part-time and seasonal workers.

The bill would raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour in 2024, and then increase by a dollar-per-hour to $19 in 2025 and $20 in 2026.

Council member Bethany Hallam, a Democrat, introduced the bill a year ago.

“The basic principle is simple: We want to pay county employees a competitive minimum wage because we need to be fair to our employees in order to attract and retain qualified and motivated individuals,” Hallam said before the vote Tuesday.

She told WESA last month that the bill is an important step towards improving quality of life for county employees. Pennsylvania’s minimum wage has sat at $7.25 an hour since 2009.

“The cost of everything is going up,” Hallam said at the time. “Private entities are paying higher wages to try to keep up and Allegheny County was falling behind.”

Hallam said the increase will impact more than a thousand people employed by the county. That includes 74 salaried positions, 690 non-salaried positions, and 335 seasonal or part-time positions.

But there has been opposition. County Executive Rich Fitzgeraldheavily criticized the bill in May, estimating that the bill would cost taxpayers at least $30 million a year, and that it would “require the largest tax increase in the history of this...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMicmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndlc2EuZm0vcG9saXRp...