April 21, 2014
By Neal Tepel
New YorK, NY – As efforts to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour continue to move forward in Seattle and San Francisco, a group of New York lawmakers introduced a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour for many low-wage workers in the state. The minimum wage increase would affect business with yearly sales of $50 million or more and chains with at least 11 locations nationwide.
This would include wage hikes for employees of McDonald's and Walmart as well as other similar store networks.
The bill's sponsor State Sen. Daniel L. Squadron said, "We shouldn't have the largest, most profitable companies be the ones that most squeeze their workers."
Two opinion pieces last week pointed to a minimum wage increase as a way to boost the economy and help small businesses. An article in the Boston Globe stated that "increased income for the lowest earners flows to businesses."
A professor at the Indiana University School of law wrote in the Indianapolis Star, "The McDonald's and Walmart business model may be built on exorbitant CEO salaries and referring their front-line employees to the welfare office, food pantries and plasma banks. But that is not the way mom and pop stores want to operate, in part because low-paid workers have such limited purchasing power."
