Minimum Wage Increases Up To $11.50 Per Hour Scheduled

The topic of minimum wage and potential increases to the current minimum wage rates per state has been a hot item in the news lately, especially with states like Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota voting for minimum wage initiatives this year, as reported by MSNBC.

With a large majority of states – 27 of them at the current time – experiencing a 2014 minimum wage of only $7.25 per hour (and even less of a “tipped minimum wage” for positions like waitresses who make a minimum wage of $2.13 per hour), a good hike in the wage minimum would make a timely difference for plenty of working folks.

As reported by the Inquisitr, even politicos who verbally support a minimum wage increase might not walk the talk with their actions, like Alison Grimes. There’s also the interesting case of the Freedom Socialist Party, which pushed for a $20 per hour national minimum wage, but only wanted to pay their webmaster a $13 per hour wage rate minimum.

It would be a laughable conundrum, except for the serious situation of low minimum wage rates that send workers making even the highest end of the minimum wage scale – which runs from $7.25 to $9.32 based on state, per the Minimum Wage website – either to the food stamp line, or looking for rich people on sites like Millionaire Match, which are growing in popularity in the current economic climate.

The significance of the interest in minimum wage price hikes is evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of searches coming into Google about minimum wage per month, as reported by Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner. In fact, “minimum wage” is a query that swelled to 301,000 monthly searches in January 2014, because people expect a wage hike at the beginning of the year.

Scheduled minimum wage increases in 2015 should see Delaware hitting $8.25 per hour, and New York moving up to $9.00 per hour from the current $8.00 per hour minimum wage. By 2016, California’s current $9.00 per hour minimum wage is scheduled to rise to $10.00 per hour – and that same year, Washington, D.C., is expected to hike their minimum wage to $11.50 per hour, as shown on the MSNBC charts.

While pundits on either side of the minimum wage debate argue the merits of a wage minimum hike benefitting workers while not burdening businesses, the topic will continue to be a hot news item, because money matters in terms of the effect it has upon the livelihood of workers and their families.

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