June 21, 2014

Massachusetts Workers' Victory

by Eesha Williams
Tags:

On June 19, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill that, if signed by governor Deval Patrick, will make the state's minimum wage higher than any other state's. If Patrick signs the bill, it will raise the state minimum wage to:

$9 an hour on January 1, 2015;

$10 an hour on January 1, 2016;

and $11 an hour on January 1, 2017.

“I think it’s a good solution,” Patrick told the Boston Globe, referring to the minimum wage bill.

Russ Davis is director of www.massjwj.net. He said, “This is a big victory. More than 600,000 workers will get wage increases. This only happened because thousands of volunteers collected over 360,000 signatures to qualify raising the minimum wage to be on the ballot. House speaker Robert DeLeo and senate president Therese Murray said they had to take this up because we had the signatures to put it on the ballot.”

About 20 percent of workers in Massachusetts will get a raise if Patrick signs the bill. About 85 percent of those workers are over 19 years old, Davis said.

Comments

Governor Patrick signed the

Submitted by Eesha Williams on Fri, 06/27/2014 - 19:20.

Governor Patrick signed the bill.

Worker's Bill

Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 06/21/2014 - 14:39.

This is good news. And good for Massachusetts!
I hope the Governor signs it.
I also hope that $11 per hour is a living wage in Massachusetts.

Post new comment

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
                 ____   ____    _____   _____ 
  ____   __ _   / ___| / ___|  | ____| |_   _|
 |_  /  / _` | | |  _  \___ \  |  _|     | |  
  / /  | (_| | | |_| |  ___) | | |___    | |  
 /___|  \__,_|  \____| |____/  |_____|   |_|
Enter the code depicted in ASCII art style.