With Focus on Income Inequality, Albany Bill Will Seek $8.50 Minimum Wage
The Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park is no more, but the focus it brought to income inequality is having an impact in Albany and beyond.
The Assembly speaker,Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, plans to introduce a bill on Monday to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour, a 17 percent increase. The bill also calls for the minimum wage to be adjusted each year for inflation.
“It is impossible to live in this city on $15,000 a year,” said Micah C. Lasher, Mr. Bloomberg’s director of state legislative affairs.
The state’s current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, which is lower than that of 18 states and the District of Columbia, took effect three years ago as the result of a federal law. The State Legislature last approved a minimum wage increase eight years ago.
For Mr. Silver, the minimum wage proposal is one element of a broader agenda, including a tax cut for families making less than $30,000 per year, that he said he hoped would begin to address inequality issues.
“When you work full time at the minimum wage, you are poor in New York. You’re not making enough to get by. We want to have people able to support their families, plain and simple.”
Mr. Silver said in an interview.
Supporters say that a minimum wage increase could help bring low-income families out of poverty, stimulate economic growth and spur job creation.
“The Occupy movement shone a light on inequality,” said Dan Cantor, the executive director of the Working Families Party. “Raising the minimum wage is a modest but real step in balancing the scales.”
But opponents say it could hurt low-income earners and small businesses, by raising the cost of doing business, which could lead to layoffs.
Mr. Silver’s proposal “is a good start, but really is not enough for New York’s cost of living and New York’s economy,” said Paul Sonn, the legal co-director at the project.
(via truth-has-a-liberal-bias)
