The movement to raise the minimum wage had a great year, winning increases in 15 states.
Voters in five states — Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska and South Dakota — approved raising their minimum higher than the federal floor of $7.25 an hour through ballot measures, while lawmakers in Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia voted to raise theirs.
That’s not counting raises approved in previous years that are still being phased in. Overall, 21 states are set to raise their minimum wages next year. When all is said and done, 26 states will have rates higher than the federal minimum in 2015.
Yet for all that success, few expect it to prompt the federal government to raise its rate. Instead, activists on both sides say the momentum will remain confined to the state and local level since Congress will be in control of the Republican Party.
“I think what you’ll see [in 2015] is additional efforts to hike the minimum wage at the state level across the country,” said Neil Sroka, spokesman for the activist group Democracy for America, founded by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. “The fact that we won minimum wage increases in Arkansas and South Dakota means that this is incredibly fertile terrain.”
The main effort will be to push grassroots organizers to use their states’ ballot initiative process or to press state lawmakers to raise the minimum. Conservative groups agree state and local governments are where the action will be.
“I think that advocates for a higher minimum wage will take November’s ballot initiative victories to heart and try to replicate that across the country,” said Cara Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Jeanne Mejeur, legislative policy analyst for the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, said state and local efforts to raise the minimum wage tend to come in waves when the federal level has been stagnant for years.
“I expect that we will not see the level of introductions we saw this year but probably 20-30 states will look at the issue,” Mejeur said.
The states most likely to see action, according to the NCSL, include Idaho, Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Those are states that have relatively easy ballot initiative processes and either don’t have minimum wages higher than the federal level or have ones that are only modestly higher. Maine’s, for example, is $7.50 an hour.
Which isn’t to say that advocates won’t try to raise the wage again in states that already have a higher minimum. While Democratic lawmakers have pushed a $10.10 minimum wage, Most of the activist groups involved in the movement, such as Strike Fast Food and Our Walmart, both of which are backed by organized labor, are calling for a $15 minimum wage.
“The only limits are what we can get on the ballot,” Sroka said, looking forward to 2016.
Michael Saltzman, research director of the business-backed Employment Policies Institute, argued that the movement may have reached its limit at the state level.
“The lowest-hanging fruit is on the very lowest level, the city level. I think you are going to see a big push to get something done in New York,” he said, adding that there are active efforts in Los Angeles, Tacoma, Wash., Portland, Ore., and Louisville, Ky.
Most business groups, especially those representing small businesses, have opposed higher minimum wages, which increase labor costs. A February Congressional Budget Office report said the Democrats’ proposed national $10.10 wage would cost the economy 500,000 jobs.
Notably, no experts interviewed expected any federal action in 2015 with the Republican Party taking control of Congress.
The paradox of the minimum wage is that while it is broadly popular, it has not been an effective partisan wedge issue. Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation to raise the rate to $10.10, but GOP opposition stymied it.
The White House boosted the effort when it applied a $10.10 minimum wage to all federal contracting work in October.
That was intended to raise the profile of Democrat-backed state-level efforts. But four of the five states that passed ballot initiatives also sent Republicans to the Senate. The one that didn’t, Illinois, ousted incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn in a surprise upset.
“The progressive movement came up big in this last election even though Democrats, as a crew, didn’t do that good,” said Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., during a recent conference call with Democracy for America.
As a consequence, the next Congress will have GOP majorities in both houses, neither of which is expected to be under pressure to take up the legislation. After all, the party hasn’t suffered because of its opposition.
The White House is now looking at other ways to address wage-related rules. The Labor Department is set to announce revised rules in February under the Fair Labor Standards Act that would effectively force business to pay more overtime.
Liberals see the failure of the minimum wage as proof that the Democratic Party is failing to excite its base voters. “Democrats didn’t support those initiatives nearly loudly enough,” said former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who served under President Bill Clinton.
Conservatives counter that while the issue is popular, the support doesn’t run that deep, because most people make more than the minimum.
Labor Department data says just 4.3 percent of workers earn at or below the federal minimum wage. Of those, 59 percent are only part-time workers and almost half, 46 percent, are 24 years old or younger — hence the stereotype of a minimum wage earner being a teenager seeking extra pocket money.
People support the idea of raising the minimum wage because they think it will help low-wage workers, EPI’s Saltsman argues. At the same time, they don’t view it as a way to fix the economy and are wary of setting it too high.
“If you look at the polling on something like a $15 minimum wage, people aren’t as supportive of that as they are of a $9 minimum wage,” he noted. A June CNN poll, for example, found that 71 percent of respondents endorsed raising the minimum, but that support fell to 52 percent when they were asked if the wage should be above $10.10.
