Talks on Pa.’s minimum wage heat up before deadline

HARRISBURG >> Discussions on raising Pennsylvania’s minimum wage for the first time since 2009 are heating up, in part to get Gov. Tom Wolf to abandon an effort to extend overtime pay eligibility to tens of thousands of additional workers.

Negotiators are up against a Thursday deadline, when a state rule-making board is scheduled to vote on an overtime regulation proposed by Wolf.

A key element of a minimum wage agreement between Wolf, a Democrat, and the Republicancontrolled Legislature is likely to be Wolf’s willingness to rescind the overtime proposal.

The Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry has opposed an increase in the minimum wage. However, it effectively views a minimum wage increase that puts Pennsylvania in the middle of the pack among states as the lesser of two evils than Wolf’s overtime proposal, which it says would impose unsustainable cost increases on businesses, nonprofits and colleges.

Wolf’s office would say only that talks were ongoing Friday, while leaders of the Senate’s Republican majority said negotiators must compromise for a bill to pass the chamber.

“If people want to be reasonable, we can get something done,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, said Senate Republicans have had some positive discussions.

“But ultimately it takes compromise on everyone’s side, and some people in Harrisburg don’t like compromise,” Corman said.

Raising the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is getting its most serious discussion by Republican lawmakers since Wolf began calling for an increase in 2015 and, for that matter, since the federal minimum wage was last increased to $7.25 an hour in 2009.

Currently, Pennsylvania is one of 21 states whose minimum wage is set at the federal minimum. The other 29 states, including all of Pennsylvania’s neighbors, have higher minimums, while half of the 50 states have authorized an automatic future wage increase of some sort.

Under discussion is something far more modest than what Wolf proposed in January when he pushed for a multi-year increase to $15 an hour in 2025.