It’s a bidding war in Albany when it comes to boosting the stateās minimum wage ā with the needs of New York’s economy, and of the vast illegal-migrant influx, off the tabš āle.
Gov. Kathy Hochul wants minimum pay to automatically rise with inflation, starting with an immediate boost from $15 an hour to $16.39. Meanwhile, state Sen. Jessica Ramos is literally fund-raising off the lefty drive for faster hikes that would bring the hourly wage in šthe city to $21.36š by 2026.
Context: The state minimum wage has gone from š¼$7.25/hour in 2013 to more than $14 upstate and $15 downstate.
Meanwhile, New York ended 2022 with a quarter-million fewer private-sector jobs than it had three years prior. The state has been slow to add jobs since the pandemic ā and another hike in the wage floor would further slow recovery.
Remember: Too-high wage floors most harm younger, low-wage and low-skilled workers, who already have trouble finding jobs. They’re the most likely to not be worth the minimum. Studies show that employers not only hire fewer workers, they also substitute a few higher-skilled workers for a larger number of lesser-skilled ones.
Plus, in case lawmakers haven’t noticed, the city is on track to see perhaps 100,000 new illegal-migrant residents by year’s end. They’re overwhelmingly lower-skilled, so even when they finally get work papers, they’ll be hard-pressed to get legal work even at today’s $15 minimum. Do New York’s leaders really want to force them into off-the-books work ā deeper into the shadows?
This “how high” debate is nuts. Albany’s top priority should be strengthening the stateās post-pandemic economy, not weakening it with job-killing policies.
New York’s already facing an exodus of residents and businesses, and progressives only want to speed up the departures.