With the coming of the new year, minimum wage earners in the state will also enjoy a bit of an easing in the burden of rising costs: the wage will go up $0.50 an hour, reaching $16.50 in NYC, Westchester and Long Island and $15.50 in the rest of the state as part of a series of increases being phased in over multiple years. Thus, our pay floor keeps climbing over the pitiful $7.25 set by Congress in 2009 as the federal minimum wage.
The minimum wage — hard-won by labor — is not supposed to codify the absolute lowest amount employers can get away with paying. In its purest form, the minimum wage is supposed to be the minimum that a worker needs to be compensated for a full workweek in order to meet their most basic necessities and have a little left over.
At a national level, this is not the case now and has not been for a while; a 2021 study found that a full-time minimum wage worker could not realistically afford rent for a two-bedroom market-rate apartment anywhere in the United States, and could nab a typical one-bedroom in only some 7% of counties nationwide.
While there’s a stereotype of the minimum wage worker as a kid or a student making a little extra cash on the side, the fact of the matter is there are millions of adults around the country making either the federal minimum wage or a higher state-level version. Huge swaths have more than one job and are still rent-burdened and living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Costs have climbed 49% since 2009, while the federal minimum hasn’t budged a penny, so many states, like New York, have boosted their own minimum wages. However, there’s a Catch-22 situation where they also generally have higher housing and living costs that can partly cancel out the increased pay. Part of the issue here is that adjustment of this wage floor tends to depend on perhaps the most unreliable process of all: legislative action.
By the time lawmakers have faced enough public pressure and done enough maneuvering to agree to pass a minimum wage increase, this wage has often already gone down in inflation-adjusted terms. The Fight for $15 movement, which has been pushing Congress to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, got started in 2012, meaning that target has already lost about a third of its actual spending power without having actually passed.
This is why New York’s simple solution is so common-sense: after another 50-cent jump in a year, the state minimum will be pegged to inflation starting in 2027. There won’t need to be consistent haggling and pressure campaigns and horse-trading for the wage to keep pace with increases in the cost of living. Such an easy fix will make workers around the state breathe easier, and hopefully be able to better afford to stay here.
We understand that some employers will grumble about the increases, arguing it will put a dent in their bottom line and perhaps threaten their business models, but that’s been the gripe since the first minimum was imposed in 1938, at 25 cents an hour. Still, an economy where an big chunk of people can’t afford basic necessities is just not a unhealthy one, it’s one that is ripe for political radicalization and the fraying of the social fabric.
