The State Senate late last month passed a bill gradually increasing the state’s minimum wage to $11 per hour by 2016 and tying future increases to inflation.
“Since the early 1980s there’s been a widening gap between pay for people at the top and pay for everyone else,” said area Sen. Mike Barrett, Vice Chair of the Committee on Labor and Workforce Development. “This bill will help bridge that gap.”
Adjusting for inflation, the state minimum wage in 1968 would be worth $10.72 today; the current rate is $8 per hour. A full-time minimum wage worker back then earned $21,400 a year in today’s dollars, roughly $5,400 more than they earn now.
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“Ideally the minimum wage will let you buy food and put a roof over your head,” Barrett said. “It shouldn’t enable you to get rich, but if you’re working forty or fifty hours a week it should enable you to avoid being poor.”
The poverty rate in Massachusetts has increased by 20 percent since 2006 and the child poverty rate has spiked by 25 percent. Poverty is linked to negative health effects and lower academic performance; the school dropout rate for low-income families is 4.5 times higher than for others.
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According to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, 485,000 workers would directly benefit from a bump to $11 per hour by 2016. Money in the pockets of minimum wage workers, Barrett points out, is likely to be spent locally -- buying groceries and paying rent, for example.
The bill also increases wages for tipped workers, such as waiters, to 50 percent of the minimum wage.
Legislatures in four other states -- California, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island -- passed bills to bump the minimum wage starting in 2014. New Jersey voters approved a Constitutional amendment last month to raise the minimum wage in 2014 and tie future increases to the cost of living.
Under this bill, Massachusetts will join ten states currently tying the minimum wage to inflation.
The bill now goes to the House of Representatives.