COLUMBUS – Ohio’s lowest-earning workers will get a pay boost next Tuesday when the minimum wage rises 25 cents, but some policy experts say the wage needs to be higher.
The minimum hourly wage will increase from $8.30 to $8.55, an automatic adjustment made every Jan. 1 as the result of a 2006 vote, when Ohioans decided to keep the minimum wage indexed to inflation.
The state’s new minimum wage will be worth just 72 percent of what the federal minimum wage was worth in 1968, $11.83 in today’s dollars, said Michael Shields, researcher at Policy Matters Ohio, a progressive-leaning group that favors an increase in the wage beyond inflation.