San Francisco will be the highest minimum wage city in the country raising its living wages 20% since 2004 to $10.24 an hour. A measure in Sacramento will seek to permanently tie the minimum wage rate to inflation. Across the country wages have hardly grown at all.
During impressive economic growth cycles charts of wage growth show merely a blip of positive growth and gains. Juxtapose the average wage growth against top executive pay and the picture looks progressively unfair. Executive pay for the tope percentiles of wage earners has grown exponentially while the critical mass of wages has only gone up a blip during the same period. San Francisco along with 8 other states will help bring equity to the imbalance in wages.
According to the L.A. Times the state of Washington has the highest minimum wage out of all the fifty states with an hourly rate of $9.04 an hour. Despite the multitude of benefits from an increased minimum wage, critics point out that raising the minimum wage this aggressively could be a job killer to metropolitan San Francisco. With a thriving restaurant industry most wage earners work in restaurants, though most don’t make tips. So those waiters who pull $50+ a night in tips will unduly have their minimum wage increased. For restaurants that can’t afford to keep up with the expenses of employment they may have to downsize. In essence, those people the measure seeks to help may have to find work elsewhere. At any rate waiters and waitresses in the San Francisco area will be pleased come January 1 when the wage increase takes effect.
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