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Toledo Blade...
Ohio, 7 other states set to hike minimum wage  
December 29, 2011 

NEW YORK -- Eight states -- including Ohio -- will ring in the New Year with a higher minimum wage, under state laws that require wage floors to keep pace with inflation. 

San Francisco, one of the few cities that sets its own minimum wage above the federal level, is also raising wages for the lowest-paid workers in the new year. It will become the first big city in the country to require companies to pay more than $10 an hour. 

The increases in Ohio, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington will be 28 cents to 37 cents an hour, according to the National Employment Law Project. That is an extra $582 to $770 a year for a full-time minimum-wage worker and resets the states’ minimum wages to $7.64 to $9.04 an hour. 

At the high end is Washington state, which will become the first state in the nation to set its minimum wage above $9 an hour. The federal wage floor for most workers is $7.25 an hour. 

In Ohio, the minimum wage will be $7.70 an hour, up from $7.40. 

About 1 million minimum-wage employees will be affected by increases in the eight states, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization. An additional 400,000 who make just above minimum wage also are likely to get raises because many employers adjust their pay distribution for all employees when a new minimum goes into effect. 

Most of the minimum-wage employees affected in these states are women, over the age of 20 and white, according to the institute’s analysis of Labor Department data. 

A national minimum wage was first enacted during the Great Depression and has been raised sporadically by Congress rather than being automatically indexed to price changes. Adjusting for inflation, the federal wage floor was highest in 1968. 

Read this and other articles at the Toledo Blade


 
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