Minimum wage rising in 20 states as year begins

Workers’ drive for $15 pay floor gaining steam

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, layoffs mounting and $2,000 stimulus checks for U.S. households looking highly uncertain, there couldn’t be a better time to bump up the minimum wage for millions of low-paid Americans, worker advocacy groups say.

Employers argue there couldn’t be a worse time, with small businesses struggling to survive amid plunging revenue and a new round of state shutdowns aimed at curtailing the latest coronavirus spike.

Workers in many areas have won the fight and will reap the benefits.

Twenty states and 32 cities and counties – including many in California – are raising their minimum wages in the new year, according to a report provided exclusively to USA TODAY by the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group.

Tennessee doesn’t have a state minimum wage, so its base pay will remain at the $7.25 federal minimum.

About half of those localities raising their rates will reach the $15 threshold championed by striking fast-food workers and deemed a pipe dream just a few years ago.

Some will act later in the year, so a total 24 states and 50 cities and counties – a record 74 jurisdictions – will boost their pay floors sometime in 2021, NELP figures show.

The fact that a record number of states and localities are lifting base pay despite vehement opposition from business groups during the pandemic is a big deal, says Yannet Lathrop, a researcher and policy analyst at NELP.

Business groups in Maryland and New York, in particular, sought to delay the hikes, but state officials pressed forward.

Meanwhile, the turnabout in views about a $15 wage base has been headspinning.

Even states with relatively low minimums, like Florida and Virginia, are poised for significant increases in 2021 and headed toward $15, or at least the strong possibility of it, by 2026.

By then, 42% of the U.S. workforce will be covered by $15 minimum wage laws, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

“All workers should be able to make ends meet,” Lathrop said.

“They’re not earning enough, especially when they’re exposing themselves to a deadly virus,” as restaurant, grocery store, health care and other front-line workers are doing.

Yet employer groups say the effect of a $15 wage will be dire for small businesses battered by the pandemic.

Seventeen percent of restaurants, or more than 100,000, have closed permanently or for the long term amid the pandemic, the National Restaurant Association has said.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009, with Senate Republicans repeatedly blocking efforts to increase it.

Still, 30 states, with more than 60% of the US workforce, now have pay floors above the federal government’s, according to NELP.

WILFREDO LEE/AP FILE Rosario Vargas bags groceries at the Presidente Supermarket in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami. Florida’s minimum wage will increase from $8.56 to $10 an hour in September.