Thread: Arizona minimum wage will rise to $10 next year

Arizona minimum wage will rise to $10 next year

• By Howard Fischer Capitol Media Services
• Updated 27 min ago
• (3)

• Mamta Popat / Arizona Daily Star 2014

Protesters outside a Tucson fast-food restaurant on East Grant Road in 2014 called for a higher minimum wage.

Hundreds of thousands of Arizonans are in line for a salary increase come January.

Arizona voters approved Proposition 206, which will raise the minimum wage to $10 next year and then gradually increase it to $12 by 2020, while also requiring some employers to provide three days of paid sick leave.

Preliminary results show it won on a margin of close to 3-to-2 in Tuesday’s election.

The business community mounted only token opposition to the measure, raising less than $40,000 for the campaign at last count.

Proponents, by contrast, collected close to $4.3 million.
Pro-206 campaign manager Bill Scheel has figured there are about 779,000 Arizonans now earning below $12 an hour, or about a quarter of the state workforce.

He also estimated about 934,000 Arizonans are in jobs where there is no paid sick leave.

Proposition 206 is an outgrowth of a 2006 voter-approved law that established Arizona’s first-ever minimum wage, setting it at $6.75 an hour when the federal minimum was $5.15.

The 2006 law also requires annual inflation adjustments, which have pushed the minimum now to $8.05 an hour; it would have gone up another dime automatically in January.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

Explaining why the Arizona Chamber of Commerce didn’t mount a stronger campaign against the new measure, which it claims will result in job losses, spokesman Garrick Taylor said:

“Unfortunately, when these things get on the ballot across the country, they’re likely to pass.”

http://tucson.com/arizona-minimum-wa...f58d9840b.html

4 States Opt To Raise Minimum Wage; 7 Loosen Marijuana Laws
NPR‎ - 2 hours ago

Full Election 2016 Results ... Raising the minimum wage: Maine, Arizona, Colorado and Washington all voted to increase the minimum wage to at least $12 an hour by 2020.

What about all the office workers making $12 - $15 an hour? Who have to dress and speak properly, know how to use computers, greet clients, can spell and type, use computer programs, be professional? Are they going to get a $5 buck increase in wages?