Minimum wage

A new study titled The Cost of Repealing Michigan’s Prevailing Wage Policy provides new data about the law’s true impact on total construction costs and economic activity. As we wrote earlier this month, despite the incredibly strong voter support for the current prevailing wage law, the state GOP is pushing a repeal agenda. The new study shows that repeal would kill jobs and hamper the state’s economy.

Mitch McConnell visits Briggs and Stratton factory in Murray, Kentucky and only 40 of the 1000 employees attended. Television stations and newspaper crews were reportedly not allowed access to the event.

After three Spanish-language ads have hammered Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Cory Gardner in the contentious battleground of Colorado, the SEIU has moved on to another hard hitting issue for Latino voters: liveable wages.

South Carolina's Small Business Chamber of Commerce has now publicly advocated for a federal minimum wage increase, to $10.10. South Carolina has no state mandate on the minimum wage, meaning that only a federal increase would benefit the state's workers in the near term.

Burger King is in talks to buy doughnut chain Tim Hortons and create a new holding company headquartered in Canada, a move that could shave its tax bill. Such an overseas shift, called a tax inversion, has become increasingly popular among U.S. companies and a hot political issue.

California Republican gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari did a stunt spending a week homeless in Fresno looking for a job, then wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal. It turns out — shock! — that getting a job isn't as easy as asking for one, and — double shock! — relying on our patchwork safety net doesn't exactly deliver results or human dignity.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has dropped the city’s legal challenge to a law that would require companies receiving more than $1 million in economic development aid to pay the prevailing wage. The legal challenge to the law began after the city council overrode Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of the law by a 44-4 vote in May of 2012. Following the override, Mayor Bloomberg sued the city council arguing that the legislation would increase city costs and was preempted by the state’s minimum wage law.

San Francisco is looking to join the $15/hr minimum wage bandwagon. After Seattle passed a living wage referendum, Mayor Ed Lee has decided to push for the increase, being the second in what we can hope to be waves of cities finally giving workers a better chance to succeed.

By raising its minimum wage to $15, Seattle is leading a long-overdue movement toward a living wage. Most minimum wage workers aren’t teenagers these days. They’re major breadwinners who need a higher minimum wage in order to keep their families out of poverty.

The Michigan Senate, led by Republicans aghast at the idea of paying people an actual livable wage, decided to hike the minimum wage to $9.20 – not out of the kindness of their hearts, mind you, but in a blatant attempt to circumvent a grassroots petition that would raise the wage even higher (to an – almost – decent amount).