Connecticut’s Democratic State Senators voted early this morning to raise Connecticut’s hourly minimum wage to $15 an hour in five yearly steps by June 1, 2023 – a change that will directly benefit a third of a million state residents, or about one-fifth of Connecticut’s total workforce.
After a six-hour debate, the Senate passed the minimum wage bill on a party-line 21-14 vote at 2:45 a.m. this morning. Once the bill is signed into law by Governor Lamont, the first minimum wage increase will take effect on October 1 of this year.
“Working people deserve to work with dignity,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney (D-New Haven). “Over 300,000 hardworking people will benefit from raising the minimum wage, and I’m proud that Connecticut will join other states around the country in passing this legislation.”
“Connecticut needs to pay workers the wages they deserve,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk). “By raising the minimum wage, we are ensuring that more people are lifted out of poverty and are able to provide for themselves and their families. It’s the right thing to do and our economy will benefit from it.”
“Passing this minimum wage increase will directly benefit 332,000 people in Connecticut,” said state Senator Julie Kushner (D-Danbury), who as Senate Chair of the Labor Committee brought the bill out on the Senate floor and answered legislators’ questions about it. “The public support for raising the minimum wage in Connecticut is really quite amazing. Even people who make well above the minimum wage are supportive of more pay over time for others. This support speaks volumes about the values of the people in our state, of their consideration for others. It’s wonderful to see.”
“As a business owner, I’ve thought long and hard about this issue, and I decided it was important enough to bring up the lowest-level pay for employees because I believe getting people to a higher wage is critical for the health and welfare for the State of Connecticut. It’s the fair thing to do,” said state Senator Norm Needleman (D-Essex), who is the owner of Tower Laboratories, a manufacturing company headquartered in Essex and that employs 150 people in Connecticut. “There may be unintended consequences, but I believe the good outweighs the bad. I wish the minimum wage had been indexed since I entered the workforce so we wouldn’t be dealing with an abrupt change right now. I suspect the minimum wage would be significantly higher had we done that, and we wouldn’t be fighting this battle right now. I’m glad this bill addresses that going forward.”
Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour is a popular public policy with Connecticut residents: an August 2018 Quinnipiac University poll of more than 1,000 Connecticut residents found that nearly two-thirds (63%) support increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 73% of women, 67% of people over age 67, 65% of people ages 18-24, 56% of unaffiliated voters, and 33% of Republicans.
House Bill 5004, “AN ACT INCREASING THE MINIMUM FAIR WAGE,” increases Connecticut’s hourly minimum wage from the current $10.10 per hour to:
Current state law provides a “tip credit” to employers of hotel and restaurant staff and to bartenders who customarily receive tips. The tip credit allows employers to count these employee tips as a percentage of their minimum wage requirement, thus reducing the employer’s share of the minimum wage — as long as the tips make up the difference.
The new minimum wage bill freezes the employer’s share of these employees’ minimum wage requirement at their current values ($6.38 for hotel and restaurant staff, and $8.23 for bartenders), but the bill also requires the tip credit’s value to correspondingly increase to make up for the difference between the employer’s share and the bill’s minimum wage increases. Thus, it allows employers to count these employees’ tips towards the difference between the employer’s share and the increasing minimum wage, as long as the tips make up the difference.
Today’s minimum wage bill also addresses the issue of so-called training or youth wages. Starting October 1, 2019, the bill changes the “training wage” that employers may pay to learners, beginners, and people under age 18. Current state law generally allows employers to pay these employees as low as 85% of the regular minimum wage for their first 200 hours of employment. Today’s bill eliminates the training wage exceptions for learners and beginners, and now limits the training wage only to people under age 18 (except for emancipated minors.) Thus, today’s bill requires learners and beginners who are at least age 18 to be paid the full minimum wage.
Today’s bill also requires the training wage to be the greater of $10.10 or 85% of the minimum wage, and it allows employers to pay the training wage to people under age 18 for the first 90 days, rather than 200 hours, of their employment.
Starting on January 1, 2024, and on each January 1 every year after that, the bill requires the minimum wage to be adjusted by the percent change in the federal Employment Cost Index (ECI) for all civilian workers’ wages and salaries over the 12-month period ending on June 30 of the preceding year, as calculated by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A history of the ECI can be found here: https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ncspubs.htm#tabs-2
