The raise arrived quietly, the way the good ones do: no ceremony, just a bigger number on the next paycheck. On Wednesday, minimum-wage increases took effect in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and more than 20 cities and counties, reaching workers from grocery clerks in Anchorage to hospital aides in Fresno. [1][2]
The numbers are concrete. Alaska's floor rose a full dollar to $14.00. The District of Columbia moved to $18.40, the highest state-level minimum in the country. Oregon's tiers stepped up to $16.80 in the Portland metro. Chicago reached $17.05, Los Angeles $18.42, San Francisco and Berkeley $19.61, Emeryville $20.34, and Renton, Washington now holds the highest local floor on the list at $21.57. Los Angeles airport workers moved to $25.00 an hour plus health benefits. [1]
The biggest raise went to hospital floors
California's separate health care minimum wage stepped up the same day: $25.00 an hour at hospital systems with 10,000 or more employees and at dialysis clinics, $22.00 at community and rural clinics, and $19.28 at safety-net hospitals. [4] The law covers everyone who provides or supports patient care - nurses, aides, techs, and the janitors who keep the wards running. [4] For a full-time worker, each dollar on the floor is roughly $2,000 a year.
Data
| Renton WA | 21.57 |
|---|---|
| Emeryville CA | 20.34 |
| San Francisco | 19.61 |
| Washington DC | 18.4 |
| Chicago | 17.05 |
| Alaska | 14 |
| Federal minimum | 7.25 |
What is not done
Here is the unfinished part, stated plainly. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, where it has sat since 2009 - the longest stretch without a raise since the floor was created. Adjusted for inflation, it has lost more than 30 percent of its purchasing power. [3] Every raise on this page happened because a state, a city, or a county acted on its own; workers in the twenty states that still use the federal floor got nothing on Wednesday. A raise that depends on your zip code is better than no raise, and still less than a floor.
Why it counts
Unlike a program you must discover and enroll in, a minimum-wage increase is automatic: if you worked the hours, the bigger number simply appears in your pay. This week it appears for hundreds of thousands of people, and the arithmetic of their months - the tank of gas, the school shoes, the margin between making rent and not - shifts a little in their favor. That is worth being glad about, and worth naming who is still waiting.
