Pennsylvania Senate seeks to raise minimum wage

For Josh Orange, making $7.25 per hour, the Pennsylvania minimum wage, is not enough. He wants $15 an hour.

At rallies last semester, Orange, a Pitt senior, told the story of growing up in Detroit with his mother, who worked for minimum wage to raise him and his siblings. She worked long hours in the service industry, he said, and struggled to pay her bills some months. 

Sen. Daylin Leach proposed a Pa. Senate bill in April that he claims would “drastically improve” the lives of two million Pennsylvanians who work for minimum wage. Leach’s bill would match the minimum wage to the rate of inflation, increasing it from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour. The bill would also raise the tipped minimum wage to $7.25, according to a release from the Senator’s office. But opponents say the legislation would cost other Pennsylvanians their jobs. With zero co-sponsors, the bill isn’t currently scheduled for a vote and still has to make it past a Republican-led Senate.

On April 15, protesters and minimum wage workers across the country went on strike for the day and rallied for a higher minimum wage. In Pittsburgh, fast food workers, service workers, students and community leaders marched down Forbes Avenue with banners and signs and called for a $15 an hour minimum wage. 

“Keep in mind that if the minimum wage had kept pace with labor productivity, it would now be over $21 per hour,” the release reads. “And if it had kept pace proportionately with CEO pay, it would be much higher than that.”  

Last Senate session, Leach introduced a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour. He increased the amount this session in part because he felt Gov. Tom Wolf would receive minimum wage legislation favorably, Hoenstine said.

“When you put money in the pockets of people at a lower socioeconomic level, they mostly spend it,” Steve Hoenstine, Leach’s spokesperson, said.

This, in turn, would boost Pennsylvania’s economy, according to Hoenstine. 

Sam Williamson, president of service workers union 32BJ, was successful in negotiating higher wages for service workers at Pitt and said he’s happy to see public actions to raise the minimum wage. 

“A lot of service workers are making, if not minimum wage, then close to it,” Williamson said.

Williamson supports a higher minimum wage but expressed doubt about whether or not the bill would pass in the Republican-led House. Hoenstine, however, said he was sure that Leach, who worked in January bipartisanly to co-sponsor and advocate a recent medical marijuana bill, will commit himself to getting the legislation passed.

“[Leach] has a record of proposing something and then working with his colleagues to get it passed,” Hoenstine said.

Opponents, however, such as Michael Saltsman, a research director at the Employment Policies Institute, said rather than boost Pennsylvania’s economy, the legislation will cost the state thousands of jobs. 

“Sen. Leach’s proposed $15 minimum wage is a nightmare for small businesses and less skilled employees in the Keystone State,” Saltsman said in an email Tuesday. “With youth unemployment in the Philadelphia metro area above 22 percent — right in the Senator’s backyard — now is the worst time to enact policies that would make jobs even harder to come by.”  

According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 76 percent of Americans support raising the minimum wage, though only to $9 an hour. But Orange is adamant about a $15 an hour minimum wage. Orange, who helped organize the Fight for $15 march in Oakland on April 15, said the fair wage bill is “a concrete representation of the power of organizing.” 

“This is a step in the right direction,” Orange said. “It’s acknowledging that our issue right now is not scarcity — but distribution.” 

On May 5, the Senate Labor and Industry Committee held hearings about who a higher minimum wage might affect in response to a five-part legislation package from Sen. Christine Tartaglione.

Tartaglione’s legislation would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016. 

At the hearings, Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, backed the Raise the Wage Coalition. Price said that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour “would boost the wages of 1.2 million workers of the state’s resident workforce and in total wages in Pennsylvania would increase by $1.8 billion,” according to the recap. 

Although Leach’s fair wage bill lacks co-sponsors, its supporters remain hopeful. 

“A couple of years ago, even people who wanted to raise the minimum wage weren’t talking about $15 an hour,” Williamson said. “And now they are.”