At $14.25 per hour, Massachusetts’ state minimum wage is among the highest in the country. By January, it will reach $15, completing years of scheduled increases agreed to by labor groups, business leaders, a Democratic-led Legislature, and a Republican governor.
Rarely, if ever, has the state’s legally enshrined wage floor emerged as a question on the campaign trail this year. That is, until Wednesday, when Democrat Maura Healey claimed — twice — during her first gubernatorial debate with Republican Geoff Diehl that he would target it.
“My opponent wants to take away minimum wage,” the attorney general charged, raising the specter of a Hobbesian work landscape, where someone could work 40 hours for just pennies.
But Diehl has not expressly campaigned on such a promise, nor does his lean slate of policy pledges include one. His campaign on Thursday called such a suggestion “ridiculous.” Totally eliminating a minimum wage on a state level is also effectively impossible with a federal minimum in place.
“Of course she’s trying to paint me as a typical Republican that just wants to cut everything from government,” Diehl said Thursday in an interview with WRKO host Jeff Kuhner, a Diehl supporter on whose show the former Whitman state lawmaker regularly appears.
Yet, there was a time when Diehl supported dropping the state’s minimum wage. Amid a debate over a 2014 bill that raised the state’s wage floor from $8 to $11, Diehl submitted, and later withdrew, an amendment in the...
You are reading the second issue of the Disinformation Monitor. It is published on a monthly basis and provides an overview of developments on the disinformation scenes on NATO’s eastern frontier....