The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25. In comparison, Oregon, Washington and California all have wages that eclipse $15: Oregon at $15.40, Washington at $16.28 and California at roughly $16. Starting on April 1, California will implement a new bill raising the minimum wage for fast food workers from $16 to $20. Following...
Oregons raise is because of a bill passed several years ago (eventually) tying the minimum wage to CPI with adjustments based on area. It went up by set amounts yearly. 2023 was the first year that was outside those set amounts and actually uses CPI.
https://www.oregon.gov/boli/workers/Pages/minimum-wage-schedule.aspx
Is it possible that minimum wage could go down in this system? I love that it’s tied to a metric taking all of the politics and guess work out of any increases.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the language of the bill itself, but I believe it can only go up. The language on the site trends that way too.
Makes sense, there isn’t really a thing such as deflation. Pretty sure the last time it happened we had a recession so bad we called it a depression…
I’m far from an economist, who would likely argue that wages should go down in certain times, but I think the political argument would be that nobody wants to be in power when wages go down, and we would expect that if wages were kept as is, you should expect compensating inflation to eventually catch up to that. Again, complete layperson here, so take that with a grain of salt.
Modern inflation is roughly a myth used in fear mongering propaganda and by apologists to excuse abusive behaviors. I’m not saying that there is no inflation, it exists and functions as an economic principal, but what is called inflation is decoupled entirely from the academic definition. Under academic inflation, a business who did not change prices should see a reduction in overall value, and price increases should even out to a neutral state where the value remains constant. If you ever hear “inflation” being used to excuse a price increase or a shrinkflation behavior and the company starts boasting about how much profit they are makeing or they start executing stock buybacks or give larger bonuses to executives, they are lying. Inflation had nothing to do with it. Also, if inflation is really the cause, when deflation occurs, prices should reduce to maintain the valuation, but again, it rarely if ever does.
Same with Washington State, its been slowly going up since 1999 when it first broke with the Federal minimum. 25 years…