Raising minimum wage to $10.10 should be part of Pennsylvania budget discussions: Kati Sipp

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By Kati Sipp

For months, there was much talk in the media about raising Pennsylvania's state minimum wage, which has been stagnant at the federal level of $7.25 since 2007.

Kati Sipp

Gov. Tom Wolf's original budget proposal included raising the minimum wage to $10.10, which would give 1.2 million Pennsylvanians a raise, so we talked about it at the beginning of the year.

We talked about it in May when, along with other allied groups, Pennsylvania Working Families held events and highlighted the impact that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would have across Pennsylvania, including in Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and other midstate communities.

In our continuous work on raising the minimum wage, we spoke to Pennsylvanians making less than $10.10, including single mothers, young people trying to pay for college and health care and social service providers making a pittance to do hard, vital jobs. Workers we spoke to subsiding on around $15,000 per year for full-time work or those working three jobs cried while talking to us about trying to make ends meet, or talked nervously about the idea of needing a car repair or getting an illness or injury that would require a hospital visit.

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For many of the people we talked to, it would take just a hundred dollars here and there to make the difference between being able to pay for rent and food and losing a home or going hungry. It was heartbreaking to hear so many of these stories from full-time workers and those with multiple jobs. These are appalling conditions that we should not tolerate in our communities.

Despite being stalled on for so many years, raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would have only good effects on our state. Fear-mongering predictions about raising the minimum wage have simply not come to pass in states that have raised the minimum wage well above Pennsylvania's level.

In fact, states that raised their minimum wages in 2014 showed higher job growth than those that didn't, joining many years of precedent in putting to rest the myth that raising the minimum wage hurts job creation. We know that lifting the minimum wage puts money straight back into the economy, and is good for businesses - more than 60 percent of American small business owners support raising the minimum wage to $10.10.

It's also one of those rare policies that is popular with both Democrats and Republicans. A poll showed that 70 percent of Pennsylvanian residents support raising the minimum wage, including decisive majorities of support from both political parties.

So if Democrats agree, Republicans agree, and so many Pennsylvanians like the ones we've heard from are in desperate need of a raise to boost their poverty wages, why aren't we discussing raising the minimum wage anymore now that the real budget negotiations are underway?

Why are we endlessly talking about liquor privatization, which simply isn't a priority for Pennsylvanians, while over a million Pennsylvanians wait for our state government to show them the compassion that is long overdue? Why are we waiting for legislators to take action on something that is not only good for workers but also for the economy and businesses, while they discuss relatively unimportant side issues?

It's time to demand that our legislators take action to include raising the minimum wage to $10.10 in the Pennsylvania budget. More than a million Pennsylvania workers can't afford to keep waiting. Let's address this now, not later.

Kati Sipp is director of Pennsylvania Working Families.