A conservative research organization says Connecticut’s impending adoption of a $15 minimum hourly wage could cost the state more than 15,500 jobs.
The state Senate on Friday granted final passage on a party-line vote of raising the state’s minimum wage from $10.10 to $15 by 2023. Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, has pledged to sign the bill into law in the coming days.
Following the Senate’s vote and amid attempts by Congressional Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policies Institute (EPI) in a recent study using Congressional budget office data estimated that Connecticut would be hit the hardest in New England by the wage uptick, costing the state approximately 15,531 jobs.
Nationally, more than 2 million jobs could be lost if the Democratic-controlled Congress were to approve to a $15 minimum wage, EPI estimates.
Also, a recent survey by EPI also says 74 percent of U.S. economists oppose a $15 minimum wage and 84 percent believe it will have “negative effects” on youth employment. Six-percent said it’s a “very efficient” way to improve wage disparities.
In Waterbury, medical device manufacturer Forum Plastics LLC, which employs about 150 people, said it will leave the state if the $15 minimum hourly wage is signed into law, according to the Waterbury Republican-American.
Even so, proponents of the wage increase in Connecticut, which last approved a minimum hourly wage increase in 2014, say the effort is long overdue.
In Connecticut, the $15 minimum hourly wage will benefit more than 330,000 workers currently earning the state’s $10.10 minimum wage, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based in New York City.
Proponents say it will also keep the state competitive with states like Massachuesetts, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland, which have each adopted a $15 minimum hourly wage in the last two years.
NELP says Connecticut’s rising minimum wage will be a boon to the state’s slow economic recovery.
“Connecticut workers will get a significant boost in pay that will ensure greater economic security and dignity,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the NELP. “Local Connecticut businesses will thrive even more as workers have money in their pockets to spend on basic necessities and small luxuries, like eating out and buying clothes for their kids.”
