Let’s make the minimum wage in Minnesota enough

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One day last spring, a woman named Bree testified before the Minnesota Legislature about the impact of minimum wage and cried hard enough that I reached for a box of tissue for her.

“What more should I be doing?” she asked us.

The people living at low and minimum wages experience every economic decision, from housing to nutrition to access to health care. They make impossible choices. One woman needed a ride to our hearing because she couldn’t afford to fix her car; others weigh buying medication against paying their rent.

Meeting basic needs is a necessity over accumulating savings, investing in a house or starting a college fund. They can’t take a vacation, and must think long and hard about whether their children can go to summer camp, join the marching band or try a sport.

They live on the statistical margins of our economy, but people aren’t statistics or margins. They’re people.

Today about 90,000 Minnesota workers are paid the state minimum wage. They are disproportionately women and people of color. Every time the state raises the minimum wage, as it will again on Jan. 1, each of their lives changes for the better.

For decades, raises to Minnesota’s minimum wage only occurred when the Legislature and administration could agree and were willing to risk political backlash from conservative business groups. For many low-income Minnesotans and families, this meant that the wage stayed stagnant regardless of natural inflation, hurting their ability to make ends meet.

That finally ended in 2014, when — under the last DFL trifecta — the state minimum wage moved from a pathetic $6.15 an hour (less than $13,000 a year, working full time) to $8. Leaders also tied the wage to inflation in future years, turning what had been a political calculation into an economic one.

This year, a bill I chief authored moved the cap on potential inflationary increases from 2.5% to 5%, meaning if that’s the level of inflation, that’s what our wage will be raised. We also eliminated special protections that exempted small employers.

At the moment, our $10.85 puts us middle of the pack, higher than those that defer to the still-anemic federal minimum ($7.25), but well behind the 11 states that have or will soon enact a $15 rate. Of our neighbors, we’re behind South Dakota, with its minimum of $11.20. That story is an instructive one: After legislative reluctance on the part of conservatives, South Dakota voters petitioned their government, then approved an increased, inflation-tied wage by ballot measure in 2014.

That same year, as some groups warned about the effect of raising the Minnesota wage, our state unemployment rate was above 4%. A decade later, through consistent raises to the minimum, our unemployment rate has recently hovered around 3%.

And despite what opponents may imply, the vast majority of Americans working minimum wage jobs are older than 20, and the median age is 35. They are not teenagers trying to make a little extra money. They are people approaching middle age trying to find stable housing, make car payments, put food on the table and pay for their health care, and approximately one-quarter of them are parents.

Including mine. Since my childhood, my mom has bounced between the minimum or low wages at a food packaging factory, always on her feet and working with her hands, perfect execution expected. And she does it again, and again, day after day, for years on end, always working toward paying off immediate needs and pending bills.

There is not a state in America where a minimum-wage worker can afford a second bedroom. Picture tens of thousands of Minnesota parents whose kids have to sleep in their same bedroom, or on the couch, just because our state’s prosperity is not reflected in our minimum wage.

Let’s bring the margins in. We did the right thing lifting the cap on the wage raises year-to-year, but we should be boosting the underlying number outright. If states and cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul can raise their minimum wages to $15 or above, as they have, the state of Minnesota should be looking at them not as outliers, but as examples.

We know getting by is not, in fact, enough. When the 2025 session convenes, I plan to bring together economists, working people, business owners and other experts to revisit our minimum wage. I welcome your stories and your insights.

And I hope someday soon, people like Bree won’t feel like crying when they talk about their income.

Zaynab Mohamed, DFL-Minneapolis, is a member of the Minnesota Senate.