澳彩开奖

The political committee Florida for a Fair Wage announced last week that the campaign has finished collecting the signatures it needs for ballot consideration and should reach all the requirements before the February deadline.

The 澳彩开奖 Action Fund also announced it was joining the campaign to help pass the initiative.

If the constitutional amendment is , the state鈥檚 minimum wage would increase to $10 an hour on Sept. 30, 2021, and rise $1 each year until it hits $15 in 2026. After that, it would increase every year at the rate of inflation.

The bump in pay for low-wage workers would set Florida far apart from other Southern states. Florida ($8.46) and Arkansas ($9.25) are the only states in the South that have adopted a minimum wage higher than the federal version of $7.25.

Currently, Washington, D.C., has the highest minimum wage in the country, at $14. Three states 鈥� Massachusetts, Washington and California 鈥� are second at $12.

An increase is already popular among Florida voters. A in June found that 76 percent of voters support an increase from the current $8.46 an hour.

That shouldn鈥檛 come as much of a surprise. Most of the existing research on minimum wage increases points to favorable results for , as well as and the .

In July, the U.S. House of Representatives to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by October 2025. If enacted, according to by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), 17 million workers would see an increase to $15 an hour, and roughly 10 million more would see slightly higher wages above the proposed minimum.

The CBO also estimates that the $15 wage would lead to 1.3 million lost jobs nationwide by 2025. But that minimum wage hikes do not necessarily lead to the loss of low-wage jobs, as opponents in Florida and elsewhere invariably claim.

One analyzed 138 state-level minimum wage increases over roughly four decades and found that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged years after increases of varying degrees.

鈥淥ur research is able to tease out whether there are different effects from much larger minimum wage increases, and what we found is after a much larger minimum wage increases, you do see workers鈥� wages rise even more, but you also don鈥檛 see any kind of change in overall employment for low-wage workers,鈥� said Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute and one of the authors of the study. 鈥淪o even [with] larger increases, at least in our study sample, you don鈥檛 result in the kind of scare stories we often hear about minimum wages.鈥�

At the federal level, the minimum wage hasn鈥檛 been raised since 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. During that time, the real value (adjusted for inflation) of the minimum wage has .

In 2004, Florida voters approved a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 鈥� the federal floor at the time 鈥� to $7.40 by 2006 and then annually each year based on the consumer price index. Afterward, found strong job growth, as opposed to the predictions of job losses by opponents.

If another increase is approved by voters, according to from Florida International University鈥檚 Center for Labor Research and Studies, workers in the state鈥檚 leisure and hospitality industry could see the biggest gains. That sector more than 1.3 million people and has had the lowest average hourly wage among other industries since 2009.

The increase would herald a historic shift in labor policy in the South.

According to, only seven states have no minimum wage law at all or a wage set below the federal minimum. Six of those are in the South. The federal minimum wage still applies in those states.聽

鈥淭hat there鈥檚 likely going to be a very ambitious minimum wage proposal on the ballot is a tremendous development in terms of labor policy in the Southeast,鈥� said Zipperer. 鈥淔or many decades, labor policy or the lack of labor regulation in the South has been suppressing wages, and oftentimes suppressing wages for people of color, or in ways that disproportionately affect people of color, like the minimum wage. I think it would be a tremendous turn for the better if we saw that change.鈥�

Photo by AP Images/David Santiago