The $15 minimum wage that kicked into effect Jan. 1 was years in the making and took more than five more years to be implemented. Now, with the new rate just setting in, key power players have set their sights on making Massachusetts the first state in the country to move to $20 per hour.
Members of the Raise Up Coalition, an influential constellation of organized labor and community groups, will press lawmakers to support legislation laying out four annual minimum wage hikes to bring the standard rate up to $20 by 2027 while nearly doubling the separate minimum wage for tipped workers to $12 per hour.
The proposal, which has already generated opposition from at least one industry group, will spark new debate about an appropriate wage floor and impacts on affected businesses. That discussion is likely to be supercharged by the potent cost of living in the Bay State, lingering pandemic-era strains on both workers and employers, and a menu of tax relief measures business leaders say are important to the state’s competitiveness.
“In 2018, when we passed the law to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, I think even then we knew $15 an hour would certainly help a lot of lower-income families and households in Massachusetts but that that would still be below what’s really needed for a living wage,” Sen. Jason Lewis, who filed a version of the $20 per hour bill, told the News Service. “The impact of unexpectedly high inflation in the last couple of years — that has really...
ALTON - Eric Sykes, the executive director of Alton Little Theater, recently took to social media to address “a narrative circulating online that Alton Little Theater is somehow an unsafe space.” ...