Minimum Wage Earners Will Be Toasting the New Year, Though Not with Champagne

There are 400,000-plus Massachusetts persons who have good reasons to be looking with eager eyes to the new year.

These are the folks who, slugging it out every day at minimum wage jobs, will be getting a legally mandated increase in their hourly pay, from $12.00 to $12.75, as of Wednesday, Jan. 1.

A minimum wage earner who works 40 hours a week will thus see her weekly before-tax earnings jump by $30, or $1,560 for the entirety of 2020.

Grossing $30 more a week may not sound exciting to most of us.

But for those at the bottom of the pay ladder, that thirty bucks is a big deal -- perhaps even the difference between making their rent on Feb. 1 or facing eviction, homelessness and all the sorrow and indignities that involves.

In 2018, the Massachusetts legislature passed, and Governor Charlie Baker signed into law, a bill that is, in five yearly increments of 75 cents, hiking the minimum wage to $15.00 by Jan. 1, 2023.  (The first of those increases took place on Jan. 1 of this year.)

The Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a non-profit that advocated long and hard for the $15 minimum wage law, earlier this month produced a helpful analysis of the impact of the imminent increase to $12.75, which showed that:

• 420,600 workers statewide will be getting this raise
• Cumulatively, it will be putting $410 million more in people's paychecks over the course of the year
• 45% of workers getting the raise are employed in food services, and 25% in retail 
• Among those benefitting here, 89% are adults, 40% are persons of color, 60% are women, and 79% have at least a high school education

In a Dec. 23 press release, Marie-Frances Rivera, president of the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, said, "This planned increase in the minimum wage will make it easier for our lowest paid workers to make ends meet.  Though, more still needs to be done to ensure that in a high-cost state like ours, we can achieve a truly inclusive economy that works for everyone."

The Center points out that Massachusetts is one of several states that will see an increase in the minimum wage in the New Year, and that California and Washington state will have higher hourly rates than Massachusetts, at $13.00 and $13.50, respectively, as will the nation's capital, the District of Columbia, where workers are already earning $14 an hour and will get a raise to $15 on July 1, 2020.

When I toast the New Year next Tuesday night, I'm going raise at least one glass to a "truly inclusive economy" and ponder the dumb luck that has spared me from every having to get by on only the minimum wage.  

To view the analysis cited above, go to www.massbudget.org. Click on "Research Areas," click on "All Reports," then click on "Impact of the Increase in the Massachusetts Minimum Wage to $12.75".