Legislature Raises State Minimum Wage to $7.15!

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OFF THE FLOOR: Organizers put faces on minimum wage issue.

By Peter L. DeCoursey
Bureau Chief

Capitolwire HARRISBURG (July 5) – Once the House voted for the minimum wage bill, I became convinced the minimum wage hike was going to pass before the Legislature adjourned for the summer. It wasn’t the fact that both chambers voted for a minimum wage hike; it was knowing what lay behind those votes. After the House cast its vote on the issue, House Majority Leader Sam Smith, R–Punxsutawney, explained to a roomful of reporters what had happened. But after doing about 10 minutes of spin, Smith became frustrated and explained himself in clear language, not the caucus–approved pap he had been retailing. It was very simple, he said: A woman he knew, waiting on him at a counter back home, asked him to vote for the minimum wage increase. He was stunned to find out that was all she was earning.

Smith, like most of the lawmakers and all of the leaders, is a decent guy, and it really bothered him that if he didn’t vote for an increase, this woman, and others like her, might never get a raise. Staffers and friends say Smith began to see minimum wage workers not as "kids on a training wage who don’t deserve higher pay," as his conservative House GOP colleagues called them, but as, at least in part, adults at the bottom of the pay scale. And it bothered him enough to want to do something about it. Earlier in the spring, Gardners Candies workers in Tyrone lobbied Senate President Pro Tem Robert Jubelirer, R-Blair, and got an unequivocal promise from him "to try to help During the four campaign trips I spent with Jubelirer after that, I heard that issue come up several times, each time from small business owners trying to talk Jubelirer out of a minimum wage increase. Each time he said he thought raising the minimum wage "was the right thing to do; the fair thing to do," and noted that even after it was raised, with training wages for younger workers and some exceptions for smaller employers, "they still aren’t going to be making very much." When the counteroffensive came from the business groups and the conservatives, Smith and Jubelirer and other converts held their ground, and the minimum wage was raised in Pennsylvania; not because of issues and arguments, but because Jubelirer and Smith saw faces when they thought of that issue.

They saw folks like the young woman candy worker who refused to let me use her name, but told Jubelirer that a minimum wage hike would let her get a car that worked and an apartment with more than one room. Smith and Jubelirer and Sen. Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson, who originally was bottling up the bill, came to see this not as politics or an issue, but in terms of faces and names they knew and remembered. Heck, as it turned out, the only reason ads addressing the minimum wage increase went up in Smith’s district is that he shares territory with Scarnati. So his constituents spoke to Smith about an ad directed at someone else. That is what lobbyists call a bonus effect. Multiply it a dozen times, with real people asking their lawmakers to help them, and you now know why the minimum wage hike passed. So that should mean that the Raise The Minimum Wage Coalition - the eastern Pennsylvania and labor union organizers who pushed this issue, especially John Dodds of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project - get no credit, right?

After all, their big rallies in the Capitol didn’t matter, and the Republicans who converted basically ignored those liberals, right? Yeah, they did ignore them, but Dodds remains the quarterback of the movement, and his "Raise The Minimum Wage Coalition" was the founder of all feasts the minimum wage hike may bring. How? Because Dodds and key allies like the Mon Valley Unemployment Project and the Lehigh Valley Community Action Council created, raised money for, and put the radio ads on in key districts. Those ads, Dodds and the AFL-CIO and the United Food & Commercial Workers said, were supposed to pressure Republican senators into voting for a minimum wage bill and ensuring it got a fair vote.

They failed on that level. Neither Scarnati nor Smith nor Jubelirer was intimidated by a few ads. But Dodds’ ads were a brilliant success at his real goal: getting poor folks whose factories and churches were being visited before the primary by politicians to ask their politicians for help. The politicians, it turned out, were unable to resist them. One top administration official said, "The radio ads were a stroke of genius and Dodds gets all the credit for creating, pushing for money, and just generally keeping pressure on." Dodds wrote, "In the end our opposition could no longer defend holding up a raise for Pennsylvania's poorest workers, and families across the state will get a much needed pay raise." It’s easy to defend such a stance on the floor of the House or Senate. Harder to do so at the Quickie-Mart when you know you are the only person likely to give that counter woman a raise.

Ultimately, Mr. Dodds’ ads told those folks what to do so they could help themselves. And they did.

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Senate Passes Minimum Wage Bill

The Senate passed an increase in the Minimum Wage to $7.15 on June 22. There was a "carve out" for workers of companies of under 10 employees, but even these workers will get to $7.15 which was better than the earlier amendment we were opposing. Our preliminary information is that close to 90% of workers are in companies with over 10 employees and will get the entire benefit of the bill.

The increase in the Senate bill will be to $6.25 on Jan. 1, 2007 and $7.15 on July 1, 2007. For workers in companies of less than 10 employees the increase will be to $5.65 on Jan. 1, 2007; $6.65 on July 1, 2007 and $7.15 July 1, 2007.

Believe it when we say that this was not what the majority party wanted to do and all of us should feel proud of our efforts to press for and win a significant increase in the Pennsylvania minimum wage. We might have written it different and better, but after 9 long years low wage workers in our state can finally see a higher minimum wage.

The bill now goes to the House.

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House Passes Minimum Wage Bill

Read Philadelphia Inquirer article

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The State House passed HB 257 today by a vote of 146-50!! Congratulations to all of you who have worked so hard on this issue. A delegation from the Raise the Minimum Wage Coalition was in Harrisburg yesterday lobbying swing Republicans on the bill.

Rep. Mark Cohen is sponsor of HB 257 and Rep. John Taylor authored the amendment to increase it to $7.15.   The amendment to raise the increase to $7.15 passed 130-66.  The bill will increase the minimum wage to $6.25 on July 1, 2006 and to $7.15 on July 1, 2007.  A $5.15 training wage, for 60 days for workers under age 20 was also included.