Progressives have a new minimum wage goal: $20 and up

An intraparty fight has broken out in New York over the state’s minimum wage laws and how to get more money to the lowest-paid workers without hurting businesses, portending similar skirmishes across the country in the coming years.

The debate is rekindling divisions among Democrats in Albany, pitting liberal lawmakers against their more centrist colleagues and highlighting fissures that have emerged in Democratic strongholds elsewhere, particularly in areas with some of the country’s highest costs of living.

Moderate Gov. Kathy Hochul — still bruised by an unflattering election performance and losing a judicial standoff with lawmakers — this year proposed pegging the state’s minimum wage to inflation, while capping year-over-year increases to 3 percent or less. The state already requires a minimum wage of $15 per hour in and around New York City and $14.20 upstate.


The Legislature last week symbolically rejected Hochul’s plan for not going far enough, raising the stakes of negotiations over the state budget due by April.

A decade after the so-called Fight for $15 campaign took root and won minimum wage hikes in some of the biggest states, liberal lawmakers and progressive activists are now aiming higher: $20 per hour or more.

California, Washington state and the District of Columbia have already edged beyond the $15 threshold, as of January. And activists are launching lobbying campaigns in more statehouses, hoping to push the minimum wage as high as $22 per hour in coming years. Others are pushing to index state minimum wages to inflation.

Among states without such caps, Washington state’s minimum wage for 2023 jumped $1.25, to $15.74, after it calculated a nearly 8.7 percent adjustment over the prior year, and Colorado’s surged by a similar percentage.

Ramos sponsors an alternative proposal that, by 2026, would raise New York’s minimum wage to $21.25 downstate and $20 elsewhere, before tagging on a less-rigid means of indexing future increases.

For instance, lawmakers in Massachusetts cut a deal in 2018 to gradually step up its minimum wage to $15-per-hour by this year. Already, members of the coalition that led the effort, Raise Up Massachusetts, are gaming out a new target.

“The baseline a decade ago is not a living wage for those in Massachusetts in any way,” Marlishia Aho, a spokesperson for one of the unions in the coalition said. “It’s so important that we have a minimum wage that is keeping up with inflation and the cost of living.”

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