Minimum Wage By State

Minimum Wage By State, Akwa Ibom State has released N16.2 billion to settle its workers minimum wage even as labour has vowed to go on strike on Tuesday. The Governor, Godswill Akpabio, yesterday sacked his Special Adviser on Labour and Productivity Matters, Mr. Ime Umoh who labour nominated for the job.
The state Commissioner for Information and Communications, Mr. Aniekan Umanah told journalists on Saturday that the N16.2 billion would cover arrears of the minimum wage and other entitlements from September to December 2011.

He said though salaries might have been delayed in recent months, it was not caused by the state government but by the delay in receiving the federal allocations which negotiation sometimes ran into serious hitches. Umanah, however, said what the state government was concerned about was the payment of the minimum wage, which the state government and organised labour signed an agreement on the modalities of payment, and not the bonus which the workers sometimes received as the 13th month salary. He said no worker could hold the state government to ransom on such a bonus, which could still be paid depending on the availability of funds.

He also lampooned the NLC for criticising the 2012 budget of the state for being anti-people with its lopsided allocations to capital projects leaving seemingly little for recurrent expenditure. The 2012 Appropriation Bill of N407.8 billion signed into law by Godswill Akpabio last Friday showed that the Capital Expenditure was allocated N341 billion or 80 per cent while Recurrent Expenditure was given N66.2 billion or approximately 20 per cent of the total estimate.

Minimum Wage

Minimum Wage, The new year brings with it a decent bump in pay for about 74,000 Colorado workers earning the minimum wage. Colorado’s minimum wage increases 3.8 percent, or 28 cents, to $7.64 an hour effective today. That’s the biggest increase since the state linked its minimum wage to inflation back in 2006.

For an employee making that wage full-time, the increase translates into an extra $582 a year.

“The idea is to keep the purchasing power of the minimum wage constant over time relative to consumer prices,” said Rich Jones, director of policy and research at the Bell Policy Center in Denver, which advocated for the linkage.

Another 17,000 workers in the state earning just above the minimum are expected to get increases so they can stay ahead of it, Bell estimates.

“It becomes a domino effect all the way up if you have a compensation policy where you keep a consistent spread,” said Patty Goodwin, director of surveys at the Mountain States Employers Council.

That said, employers usually don’t set overall pay increases based on changes in the minimum wage, she said.

Employers the council surveyed project an average pay increase in 2012 of 2.2 percent, Goodwin said.

Some employers, however, have frozen wages since the recession in 2008, lowering the average.

The most frequent pay increase reported is 3 percent, an increase in line with those seen in the years before the recession, Goodwin said.

“These minimum-wage increases represent bright spots on an otherwise bleak economic horizon,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for higher minimum wages.

One reason is because workers at the lower end of the pay scale tend to spend any extra pay they receive, boosting overall economic activity, she said.

Although minimum-wage jobs are often associated with teenagers, more adults are finding themselves taking those positions to get by.

Eight out of 10 workers in Colorado who earn the minimum wage are 20 or older, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of census data.

Westminster resident Kelly Wiedemer, 46, is in that group. She was making $31 an hour until she lost her job as a financial analyst in the summer of 2008.

After her unemployment benefits ran out, Wiedemer took a cashiering job in October at a gas station convenience store.

“Having experienced this working-poor thing for the first time, the wage increase makes a huge difference,” she said. “It helps to offset lost spending power.”

Wiedemer said food prices in particular have gone through the roof.

“This is a step in the right direction, but it is not a living wage by any means,” she said. “It helps low-wage workers from falling further behind.”

Colorado is one of eight states that link the minimum wage to inflation. Arizona, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington are the others. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment uses the Denver-Boulder-Greeley Consumer Price Index for the 12 months ending in June to set the minimum wage for the following year. In 2010, the state’s minimum wage actually went down 4 cents an hour because of slight deflation.