With Pennsylvanians’ real wages in decline and the minimum hourly wage still locked at $7.25, lawmakers are set for huge inflation-tied pay increases.
Legislators are set for their highest pay increase ever, with next year’s hike set to push base pay past $100,000 per year, as Spotlight PA reported. Lawmakers don’t vote on their pay hikes: They’re tied to a regional cost-of-living index, meaning inflation and rising prices for consumer goods cause automatic increases.
There’s no such law for most Pennsylvania workers, whose pay increases are up to a combination of market forces and union contracts. And with high inflation, those market forces haven’t been enough to keep wages up.
In fact, wage increases generally haven’t kept pace with living expenses for most Pennsylvanians. Real hourly earnings — workers’ pay adjusted for cost-of-living and inflation — fell by an average of 3.9 percent in June, the state Independent Fiscal Office told the Williamsport Sun-Gazette.
That decline follows a series of similarly large drops in the past several months.
While average real wages decline, the minimum wage for Pennsylvania workers remains stuck in place at $7.25 per hour. That’s the federal minimum that has remained in place since 2009.
If that rate kept pace with inflation, it would be at least $10 per hour now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ cost-of-living calculator. And according to calculations by the left-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research, it would...
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