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The minimum wage in St Louis could go up as soon as next week.

The Missouri Supreme Court declined to get involved in a fight over raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour.

In February, the court rejected claims by business groups that setting a wage higher than the state's would spawn regulatory confusion. The state's minimum wage is currently set at $7.65 an hour.

But the court refused to revisit the issue, ending the debate.

The ordinance sets a $10-an-hour minimum wage in the city this year, climbing to $11 in 2018.

Mayor Lyda Krewson calls the..........

Good! Let's hope for the sooner the better.

JEFFERSON CITY, MO. - A new minimum wage in St. Louis could be undone under legislation heading to Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens.

Missouri's Republican-led Legislature gave final approval Friday to a bill banning cities from adopting minimum wages higher than the state's rate, which is currently $7.70 an hour.

The intent is to reverse a $10 an hour minimum wage that took effect May 5 in St. Louis after being upheld by the courts.

The Senate passed the bill despite vigorous opposition from Democrats. The House then did likewise in the final moments before the mandatory 6 p.m. deadline to end its work...............

........The increase took effect in St. Louis last week, marking what low-wage workers had hoped was the end of a two-year legal fight with business groups that had challenged the city ordinance.........

“They literally took money out of the pockets of individuals.”

.........Things were supposed to be a little easier for her by now. In 2015, St. Louis passed a minimum wage increase that would have mandated that workers be paid at least $9 an hour that year, $10 an hour this year, and $11 by next year. But it passed on the very same day that the state’s preemption law, which blocks cities and localities from increasing their own wages, took effect. After a consortium of business groups sued to block the increase, it was under an injunction until a judge in February ruled in favor of the increase. It immediately took effect after the injunction was lifted.

But while the $10 minimum wage is technically in effect now, Douglas says she still hasn’t seen any extra money in her paycheck. She still makes just $7.90 an hour, even after a decade of working at the same place.
“This is how much I really need this,” she said, thinking about her potential water shutoff. “I need that ten dollars so I can pay my bills.”........

Reports that the Ontario cabinet discussed proposed changes to labour legislation this week was met Friday with mixed emotions.

Labour advocates lauded the two main proposals leaked from the cabinet session, while the spokesman for parts manufacturers was less than enthusiastic.

The province is said to be on the cusp of raising minimum wage to $15 an hour from $11.40.........


........Volpe said raising minimum wage could affect the pool of available labour for his industry. Workers may eschew automotive jobs for other employment that does not involve assembly lines or shift work, he said. “It generally tightens the labour pool.”

But the union that represents autoworkers applauds the change. “People need a liveable wage,” said Unifor president Gerry Dias. “If you can’t afford to pay 15 bucks an hour, you have to look at your business model.”

Dias said, in the automotive parts industry, there are some non-unionized shops that pay less than $15. Some of the owners, meanwhile, are making millions.

“For them to object to people making $15 an hour pisses me off — the hypcocrisy,” he said.

Auto analyst Dennis DesRosiers said increasing minimum wage will have little effect on the industry. “I have a hard time connecting the dots on that,” he said. Most plants pay more than minimum wage and those that don’t constitute “a fly speck in our industry – as it should be.”

Autoworkers deserve higher wages because the work is repetitive and physically difficult, he said. “They deserve the high pay they get.”

In addition to boosting minimum wage, the province appears poised to allow workplaces to become unionized without a secret-ballot vote by workers. Instead, all unions will need to be certified in a workplace is having a majority of workers sign union cards............

Voters in Kansas City, Missouri, will on Tuesday consider raising the city's minimum wage well above the state minimum, even though a new Missouri law forbids cities from making their own rules on the issue.

The measure is among several in local elections across Missouri.

The Kansas City proposal would create a minimum wage of $10 per hour on Aug. 24 and increase it annually starting Sept. 1, 2019, eventually reaching $15 per hour in 2022.

But if it passes, what happens next isn't clear because Missouri's Republican-led Legislature in May passed a measure barring local government from enacting minimum wages different from the state. The law, effective Aug. 28, forced..............

.........At the polls Tuesday, 69 percent of Kansas City voters approved a question that calls for a city wage floor of $10 an hour, effective Aug. 24, 2017, plus annual increases of $1.25 an hour, beginning Sept. 1, 2019, until the minimum reaches $15 an hour in 2022.........

...........“We believed there was a growing coalition of black and white, Latino, Native American, rich, middle class, poor, labor, unemployed, elected officials and employers — a broad-based coalition — that believed income inequality was and is a major issue in Kansas City and across this country,” said the Rev. Vernon Howard Jr., a leader in the Kansas City initiative. “We want to thank all those individuals who voted but are not low-wage workers for being people of good will.”...........

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.

The restaurant is on “short shift” at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders – roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.

Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, can’t make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe – founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm- to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didn’t take breaks there either, although they were allowed..................

Jane and Lily stop by the D. Michigan has another legend as Lily Tomlin speaks briefly on what it's like to come back to the D. Jane and Lily discuss the hardship that women go through when it comes to wages. Most notably tip workers who's base salary is less than minimum wage and rely very heavily on tips. In this video it will shock you how much tip workers base salary in Michigan is.

I was so excited that Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda recently came to town, and I had the chance to attend an exclusive dinner with them.

I arrived in joy. I left ashamed.

And now that the iconic entertainers have left Detroit, it is up to us to focus, without the sheen of their celebrity, on what we should have been doing, anyway: shining a light on unfair wage laws, particularly here in Michigan, particularly in the restaurant industry.

So let’s take a minute to consider what we’ve been ignoring:

Imagine serving food to people for a living.

Imagine making $3.38 an hour doing it.

Imagine working eight to 10 hours a day doing it, and ending your day making less than the cost of a one of the meals you just served at the restaurant.

Now stop imagining and realize that the average restaurant worker — waiters, waitresses and some others — make $3.38 an hour.

That’s less than the cost of a.............

.......Seventy percent of tipped workers in Michigan who earn $3.38 are women, according to ROC.........

Working for $2.13 an hour has become a normal part of American culture, but tipped workers are twice as likely to be living in poverty, and are mostly female.......


.......Here in Michigan, the sub-minimum tipped wage is $3.38 an hour. It is expected, by law, that the remaining $5.52 needed to reach the state’s minimum wage of $8.90 should be procured through tips provided by customers.

However measly the money is, though, it could be worse. In 18 American states, it’s just $2.13 an hour. The rate hasn’t changed since 1991.

Restaurant-goers across the US are required to not just cover the cost of their food; they are also expected to add on a significant percentage to their final check to subsidize the restaurant’s wage bill. Convention dictates a loose 15-20% should be added if service was satisfactory.



To non-Americans, the practice seems absurd. For starters, why is there a second minimum wage, well below the minimum – isn’t that an oxymoron? Why is the employer not paying for their own employees’ full salaries? And what happens if customers aren’t feeling generous?......

“I Can’t Take Care of My Family This Way,” a song that emerged out of Resurrection City during the original 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, as performed by Jimmy Collier and Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick. Adapted from “500 Miles,” a classic folk song.

Missouri's minimum wage is set to increase 15 cents to $7.85 an hour next year.........

.......The increase is the result of a law approved by voters 10 years ago. That measure set Missouri's minimum wage at $6.50 an hour in 2007, with an annual cost-of-living adjustment if necessary.......

.......At the same moment, the Trump administration is pushing a rule that could make tipped workers even more vulnerable to harassment. In early December, the Labor Department—urged on by the restaurant lobby—announced a plan that could allow employers to steal tips from their workers. Under the new rule, employers could pool all tips and distribute this money to other workers, including non-tipped workers—or keep it for themselves. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the rule could allow employers to pocket $5.8 billion in workers’ tips each year, in an industry where 66 percent of workers are women and 25 percent of workers are women of color.

This could result not only in the theft of tipped workers’ wages—even though they are already nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers—but it could also increase their likelihood of being sexually harassed. Tipped workers are often at the mercy of customers to make ends meet financially, and the new rule would add additional pressure from employers and managers who would control the distribution of tips.......

Until now women in Iceland have earned an average 19% less than their male colleagues. But those days are over. A new law makes equal pay for equal work a must in the country — irrespective of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality.

The new law, which went into effect New Year's Day, covers about 150,000 workers in the country. The measure applies to 1,200 companies in Iceland that have at least 25 workers, and the firms will have to publish their wage scales.

A statement from the Ministry of Welfare said the law was a world first, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.

There are courses to help the companies implement the new pay scales. Upon completion, the companies get a certificate that have to be renewed every three years.................

So the minimum that companies in Iceland will be able to pay women will be the same amount paid to men.

Iceland becomes the first country to make it illegal to pay men more than women

So the minimum that companies in Iceland will be able to pay women will be the same amount paid to men.

Iceland becomes the first country to make it illegal to pay men more than women

So is everybody in Iceland paid based on a printed (now published if more than 25 employees) wage scale? (I never thought to ask anyone about that when I was there.)

........"The legislation is basically a mechanism that companies and organizations ... evaluate every job that's being done, and then they get a certification after they confirm the process if they are paying men and women equally," Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association, told Al Jazeera.........

from the article.

(partial)... No employer having employees subject to any provisions of this section shall discriminate, within any establishment in which such employees are employed, between employees on the basis of sex by paying wages to employees in such establishment at a rate less than the rate at which he pays wages to employees of the opposite sex in such establishment for equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions, except where such payment is made pursuant to (i) a seniority system; (ii) a merit system; (iii) a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production; or (iv) a differential based on any other factor other than sex: Provided, That an employer who is paying a wage rate differential in violation of this subsection shall not, in order to comply with the provisions of this subsection, reduce the wage rate of any employee.
...
(c) Records

Every employer subject to any provision of this chapter or of any order issued under this chapter shall make, keep, and preserve such records of the persons employed by him and of the wages, hours, and other conditions and practices of employment maintained by him, and shall preserve such records for such periods of time, and shall make such reports therefrom to the Administrator as he shall prescribe by regulation or order as necessary or appropriate for the enforcement of the provisions of this chapter or the regulations or orders thereunder. The employer of an employee who performs substitute work described in section 207(p)(3) [section 7(p)(3)] of this title may not be required under this subsection to keep a record of the hours of the substitute work.

The best way to get pay equality is to have a union contract.

Maybe...if its a good contract.

Here's another way....shame and pressure. In some countries (the three Scandinavian countries at least) all personal tax returns are public. As I understand it, anyone can call and request to a copy anyone else's tax return. This, apparently, serves to reduce the salary disparity.

That said, women's salaries still don't match mens in Scandinavian countries. As I mentioned earlier, women (even temporarily) leaving to workforce for family purposes tends to force down their wages.

Perhaps that issue deserves another thread.

One another topic, maybe we can address reverse ageism. In a factory setting (for example), where people are essentially doing the same thing, and that after a 'reasonable period' additional experience is not particularly relevant, why should an older worker be paid more? (I can understand from a societial/social perspective, but from a productive perspective? We are often saying what the employee does outside of the workplace should be irrelevant.....I'm just making the point that these are very complex issues...I don't think you'd disagree)