#minimum-wage

#minimum-wage

California's $20 an hour fast food minimum wage, instituted in 2024, did not reduce employment. It led to only the most modest of price increases - barely noticeable to a consumer.

"The results indicate a plethora of negative outcomes such as higher menu prices for consumers, reductions in employee working hours, widespread elimination of overtime and loss of benefits for employees," said Stephen Owen, an Economics Lecturer, University of California, Santa Cruz.

"We've partnered with Relay Delivery, a third-party delivery as a service company, in New York City to outsource some of our fulfillment responsibilities to them. This partnership arises primarily to stem elevated driver pay costs in NYC, which have more than doubled since the new driver pay law was introduced."

"Today's vote ignores the well-documented harmful consequences of wage hikes by economists. Not only would this proposal slash up to 86,000 jobs, it would also worsen inflation for Pennsylvania workers and residents."

City Hall reporters Eli Wolfe and Natalie Orenstein tracked every Oakland City Council vote in 2025 - all 138 of them at full council meetings, plus 519 more at committee meetings - to find out how your representative is doing the most basic part of the job.

Between 1978 and 2024, chief executive pay spiked by 1,094%, according to the Economic Policy Institute—which means the average CEO earns 281 times the average worker. A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies captures how this disparity persists across some of the largest companies in the country and how the low-wage workers they employ are forced to rely on public benefits.

Hairdressers across the country are preparing to increase their prices as mounting cost pressures including pension auto‑enrolment, higher product prices and the minimum wage rise put pressure on already tight margins.

ALBANY - STATE SEN. JULIA Salazar is set to announce her Living Wage for All legislation on Tuesday at a rally in Albany, joined by state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, other lawmakers and advocates. Salazar's bill would establish a $30 statewide minimum wage, tied to the cost of living. Another bill in the legislative package would eliminate the tipped minimum wage for restaurant workers.

Her complaint is that Republicans blocked legislative efforts to raise California's minimum wage, implying that if Republicans really cared about workers, they would support a higher minimum wage. She lists a group of U.S. states that have no state minimum wage law and thus "take advantage" of low-wage workers. Her question to the chairman: "What do the states on that list have in common?" The states are Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

A letter writer takes issue with the GOP Chairman of Santa Cruz's lament that Gavin Newsom and California Democrats have sabotaged state legislation that would have eliminated taxes on tips for low-wage heroes like servers and bartenders. Her complaint is that Republicans blocked legislative efforts to raise California's minimum wage, implying that if Republicans really cared about workers, they would support a higher minimum wage.

There's a whole universe of unique pizza toppings to choose from and, depending on what state or city you're in, your pizza could be round, square, or rectangular. Even the pizza base has moved on from flour-yeast-water to using more exotic ingredients like millets and cauliflower. Point being: the insatiable appetite for pizzas lies in its versatility - but that still doesn't explain why a slice of pizza costs so much in the state of Washington.

Increases range from 28 cents in Minnesota to $2 in Hawaii, with an average hike of 67 cents across all 19 states. More than 8.3 million workers will benefit from the increases, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The mean minimum wage in those 19 states will rise to $14.57 in 2026, up from $13.90 this year. Three more states - Alaska, Florida, and Oregon - plus Washington, DC are scheduled to raise their minimum wages later in 2026.

New Jersey is one of nearly two dozen states set to increase its minimum wage in 2026, and the only state in the Delaware Valley that will see a hike. On Jan. 1, 2026, the Garden State's minimum wage will increase to $15.92 per hour - up $0.43 - for most employees. According to the state's Department of Labor and Workforce Development, minimum wage for seasonal employees and small businesses will continue to gradually increase until 2028.

The 19 states hiking wages will impact over 8 million workers, an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found. Women, Black, and Hispanic workers are set to be disproportionately affected by the new increases, per EPI's analysis, and workers in states like Missouri and Nebraska will see their annual wages increase by nearly $1,000 on average.

The big picture: 19 states are raising their wage floors next month, according to the National Employment Law Project. But Washington is one of only six whose hourly minimum wages will top $16. The others are New York ($17 in some areas, $16 statewide); Connecticut ($16.94); California ($16.90); Hawai'i ($16) and Rhode Island ($16). Washington, D.C., meanwhile, will have an hourly wage floor of $17.95.

Pension auto-enrolment and increased minimum wage will add to financial burden of rising food and energy prices, says One Society owner William Monaghan

The Trump administration is one of the most anti-labor administrations in modern U.S. history - it has attempted to decertify the union representation of more than 1 million federal employees. Trump has also fired key members of the National Labor Relations Board, thus rendering it largely non-functional. Moreover his administration has come out against rules requiring disabled workers all be paid at least the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and it has blocked a Biden-era rule increasing the minimum wage for federal contractors.

We need to listen to what businesses are saying. It's not government ministers that create jobs, it's business that creates jobs. We need to make sure that we set the minimum wage at a good level but we also need to make sure that their other burdens, their business rates, their corporation taxes, all of the things they do - the endless regulation, the employment rights bill: they're just sick and tired of so much happening. Let's lighten that burden.

continues to work with partners around negotiations,

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets Local Law 124, which essentially acts to include grocery delivery companies in Local Laws 107, 108, 113 and 123, which were passed to improve working conditions and wages for restaurant delivery workers under companies like UberEats and Doordash by raising the minimum wage for those workers to $21.44/hour, changing the way tipping options are presented to consumers and increasing record-keeping requirements for companies.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

"It was a kick in the teeth," says Katya Milavic-Davies, who owns four Myla and Davis hair salons, as well as the restaurant Llewelyn's and the cafe Lulus, both in Herne Hill in south London. She says she had to increase her turnover across her four salons by 500,000 to cover the costs of the National Insurance contribution (NICs) hikes, and a national minimum wage rise, adding that businesses like hers had been "punished" for having a large number of employees.

The thinktank argues that scrapping youth minimum wage tiers could risk "pricing out" young people from entry-level roles at a time when employers are already scaling back hiring due to rising labour costs.

Almost 500 firms have been fined by the government for failing to pay some of their staff the minimum wage. Centrica, which owns British Gas, Holland & Barrett and EG Group are among the 491 employers named by The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) for underpaying their workers over several years. The companies will pay a fine amounting to a combined 10.2 million as a result of breaking the rules.

Immigration Enforcement officers visited the shop on July 26 2023 and found that a male individual was working illegally, without a right to live or work in the UK. In December 2024, under its current owners, offices found a woman working illegally. During her interviews with the Home Office, she told officers that she worked around 40 to 45 hours per week, and was paid 9 per hour, which was below the 11.44 minimum wage.