Courtesy of the Legislative Analyst’s Office:
California’s New Minimum Wage. A law passed in 2016 (SB 3 [Leno]) will increase California’s statewide minimum wage from $10 per hour to $15 per hour over a period of several years. (The law gives the Governor some opportunities to delay the increases, making the actual timing somewhat uncertain.) After the minimum wage reaches $15 per hour, it will continue to increase along with inflation.
Recent History of California’s Minimum Wage. A law passed in 2013 (AB 10 [Alejo]) increased the statewide minimum wage in two steps: from $8 per hour to $9 per hour in 2014, and from $9 per hour to $10 per hour in 2016. The state’s minimum wage had been $8 per hour since 2008. Although the “nominal” dollar amount of California’s minimum wage has never declined, it has often grown more slowly than inflation.
Minimum Wage Blog Posts. The rest of the series consists of four blog posts presenting data and observations related to California’s new minimum wage law. The first post highlights the parts of the state that will have minimum wages higher than the statewide minimum wage in 2017. The remaining three posts describe the population of low-wage workers in California. Links to these four posts are below:
- Post 1: Statewide Minimum Wage Increasing in January.
- Post 2: Low-Wage Workers by Region.
- Post 3: Who Are California’s Low-Wage Workers?
- Post 4: Low-Wage Workers’ Family Sizes and Incomes.