On Monday just before 9 p.m., Councilmember Vincent Orange rapped the gavel, officially adjourning 11 hours of testimony on four bills considering a raise in DC’s minimum wage and one bill reforming the city’s paid sick days law. More than 150 residents, businesses, and organizations had signed up to testify.
There are some clear areas of agreement. The councilmembers who attended the hearing — Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), David Grosso (I-At-Large), and Orange (D-At-Large) — expressed support for a reasonable increase in DC’s minimum wage and agreed that tipped workers should not be excluded from paid sick days. So did a broad array of groups, including the DC Chamber of Commerce and the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.
So what is reasonable? DCFPI, along with many residents, economists, community organizations and several unions who are part of the Respect DC coalition, support raising DC’s minimum wage to $12.50 in steps, starting in July 2014. There isn’t a standard blueprint for raising a minimum wage, but economists use several benchmarks to guide decision-making. One is to set an hourly dollar amount that will raise wages for the lowest-paid 10 percent to 20 percent of wage earners. The $12.50 minimum wage would equal the 15th percentile of wage earners in 2016, according to an analysis done by the Center on Economic and Policy Research. That means that three out of 20 DC workers will directly be lifted up by this increase.
Another important component of raising the wage is to index the wage annual for the cost-of-living, which is done by nine states. There are several options for doing this; one that would best reflect DC’s local economy is to tie future increases to the annual increase in average DC wages once $12.50 an hour is reached. This would ensure that the minimum wage grows in pace with overall wages.
There was significant discussion over raising the wage floor for tipped workers, such as servers and bartenders. Currently this wage is frozen at $2.77 per hour, which is just one-third of the full minimum wage and puts DC in the bottom half of states. Historically, the tipped wage was tied to the full minimum wage, initially at 50 percent and later to 60 percent of the federal minimum wage. DCFPI supports raising the tipped minimum wage to at least 70 percent of DC’s minimum wage, an approach that mirrors a proposal currently being considered by Congress.
The reform to the city’s paid sick days law makes three necessary changes. First, the proposed legislation gets rid of an unjustifiable exclusion of tipped workers from earning paid sick days. For all workers, the legislation allows workers to accrue paid sick time immediately, rather than waiting until they have been working a year, and allows them to use that leave after 90 days on the job.
Read the testimony of DCFPI Executive Director Ed Lazere here.
Read the testimony of Economic Policy Institute Policy analyst David Cooper here.
Read the testimony of DCFPI Communications Director Elissa Silverman here.
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