A grocery store cashier who’s guaranteed $15 per hour in California can legally be paid $7.25 in Texas and 19 other states — a gap in state minimum wages that’s set to widen further in the year ahead.
It’s a geographic disparity that concerns pro-worker economists, while business interests say minimum wage laws alone don’t tell the whole story.
California, the District of Columbia, and much of New York already require wages of $15 per hour or more. Massachusetts, and likely Washington state, will join them in 2023. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, announced earlier this month that his state’s minimum wage is expected to rise to $15.50 next January, as an inflation-based adjustment.
On the other end of the spectrum, 20 states stretching from Georgia to Idaho don’t require employers to pay more than the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.
“We are entering a period where people doing the exact same job in different states will have dramatically different standards of living,” said David Cooper, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network, a project of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “It stresses, in my mind, the need for some sort of intervention at the federal level to equalize this.”
Raising minimum wages nationally or in individual states to catch up to the likes of California could mean job losses or closures for small businesses. And the variation in government-mandated wages overstates actual income differences because labor market...
CNN is defending its reporting on a statement given by Iranian officials regarding a ceasefire agreement the U.S. and Iran reached just hours before President Trump was set to launch an attack on ...