State Senate Democrats want to give New York”™s more expensive municipalities like Westchester County the power to raise the local minimum wage without needing approval from the state Legislature.
Buoyed by renewed support from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Democrats are also reloading in their push to increase the state minimum wage from its current $8-per-hour level. The wage will increase to $8.75 in December 2014 and to $9 in December 2015 without any further legislative action, but the governor has said he wants to see the state minimum upped to $10.10 per hour.
In a bill introduced by Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic Conference leader, the state would allow local municipalities with high costs of living to decide to increase their minimum by as much as 30 percent above the state wage.
“Minimum wage earning New Yorkers, despite their hard work and often having more than one job, continue to struggle to make ends meet,” Stewart-Cousins, whose district includes parts of Yonkers, said.
New York is a state that doesn”™t allow its communities to set their own minimum wage, a prohibition Cuomo had previously agreed with. The governor said he”™d support the effort to give that power to municipalities based on the demands of members of the Working Families Party, a pro-union political party that decided last weekend to back Cuomo for re-election so long as he agreed to back several liberal legislative initiatives.
Since the announcement of the new bill, New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said she was in favor of increasing the city”™s minimum wage to $15, in line with Seattle, which recently became the first city in the country to reach that threshold.
The state minimum wage increased last year by 10 percent, with the Senate under the control of a coalition of Republicans and five breakaway Democrats. The Democratic Conference in a report released Monday said that move did not go far enough because it didn”™t tie increases to inflation and the purchasing power of minimum wage was plummeting in higher-cost areas of the state, such as New York City.
