This Year The Minimum Wage Can be Raised In The Majority Of States
The 2020 new year marks an historic landmark for dramatically improving many people’s living standards by increasing the minimum hourly wage. According to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages. This is not due to Trump’s tax cut which reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to as low as 20 percent. That change resulted in doubling the number of companies paying zero in taxes, according to research from the Center for Public Integrity.
Instead, guaranteed higher wages was a result of citizens working in their communities to make local governments accountable to them. This year half of the states will have raised the minimum hourly wage, at effort that was led by 22 city and county governments, with states now trying to catch up.
The movement to raise the minimum wage to $15 first caught the nation’s attention when in 2013 the Washington State city of SeaTac, with a population of less than thirty-thousand, passed a citizen’s initiative establishing it. A coalition of unions, faith groups, immigrant and community groups came together, inspired by one-day walkout strikes by non-union fast-food workers in New York city in the late fall of 2012. They demanded better working conditions and a $15 minimum wage. Walkouts by…
