COLUMBUS, Ohio – Two organizations supporting a move to raise the nation’s minimum wage to $12 an hour say it will be good for Ohio’s workers and its economy.
The Raise the Wage Act, proposed by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Rep. Robert Scott (D-Virginia) would set the federal wage floor, currently $7.25 an hour, at $8 next year, then raise it a dollar a year until 2020.
According to the Center for American Progress, 57 percent of those who would receive a raise under a minimum wage increase are working women.
“Women are much more likely to be concentrated in low wage work than men, and often times these are workers in industries that are heavily female-dominated, like the service industry, food service, retail, childcare, sectors like that,” said the center’s director of Women’s Economic Policy, Sarah Jane Glynn.
Opponents of raising the minimum wage argue it hurts the very low-wage workers it seeks to help. The libertarian Cato Institute says previous wage hikes have led to job reductions and it predicts employers will increase use of labor-saving technology that will result in higher unemployment for lower-skilled workers.
But Glynn counters that past increases have raised earnings and reduced poverty without leading to job losses.
A liberal Ohio policy group claims the increase would benefit 1.5 million workers in the state and boost its economy. Research on a similar proposal found that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 by 2015 would have created 5,800 new Ohio jobs and circulate $2.1 billion in the Ohio economy and the raise proposed by Murray and Scott could be expected to have similar results, according to Policy Matters.
“Workers are more productive than ever before. They are also more educated than ever. Yet wages in Ohio have not kept pace,” says the report’s author, Michael Shields, a Policy Matters researcher.
Glynn adds that a person working full time at the current minimum wage would earn just over $15,000, which she says is below the federal poverty line for a household with any number of children.