- With buck bump to $9 per hour, Minnesota ushers in top state minimum wage in middle America, By Brian Bakst (AP), July 28, 2015, Star Tribune: “Minnesota will vault past Illinois, Michigan and South Dakota this week to gain the highest minimum wage in the Midwestern region at $9 an hour, which also will rank among the most-generous state wage floors in the country. The dollar-per-hour bump taking effect Saturday for some 288,000 of Minnesota’s lowest-paid workers is the second of a three-stage increase adopted in 2014, when the state had one of the lowest minimum wages in the region. Next August, the wage will rise again to $9.50 and it will go up automatically with inflation in following years…”
- Proposed raise for fast-food employees divides low-wage workers, By Rachel L. Swarns, July 26, 2015, New York Times: “Rebecca Cornick cheerfully chopped 120 heads of lettuce, wiped tables and rang up some Baconators, fries and chicken club sandwiches. For most of her customers, it was just another afternoon at a Wendy’s restaurant in the East New York section of Brooklyn. Not for Ms. Cornick. She was celebrating. It was Thursday, one day after a state panel recommended that theminimum wage for fast-food workers be raised to $15 an hour, and Ms. Cornick was savoring congratulations from some regulars and the knowledge that soon, very soon, she would have more money to pay her bills…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty