Imagine working in the same position and putting in the same number of hours as a coworker, but making less money than them—not because of your talent or skill level, but because of your age.
Republican-led House Bill (HB) 1669 proposed that Virginians under age 18 make the higher of the two: either $9 per hour—that’s three dollars less than the commonwealth’s minimum wage—or the federal minimum wage, which stands at $7.25 per hour.
Mel Borja, worker power policy analyst at The Commonwealth Institute (TCI) for Fiscal Analysis, said that the bill went against the group’s research on the importance of minimum wage.
“HB 1669 is what we would consider a sub-minimum wage bill, where it carves out the minimum wage for, like, a particular group of workers,” Borja said. “In this case it happened to be teenagers, which was an interesting twist.”
Borja called the bill an affront to some of the youngest workers in the commonwealth, noting that it failed to recognize their skills and the hours that they worked.
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