Voters raise the minimum wage in four states and pass paid sick leave in two

LauraClawsonIt’s become a regular feature of elections in recent years: Even as the federal minimum wage stays stuck at $7.25 an hour, with congressional Republicans refusing to raise it, voters resoundingly choose to raise state and local minimum wages. Four states voted for minimum wage increases on Tuesday: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, and Washington. Paid sick leave also continued to gain momentum.

In Arizona, $12 by 2020 was passed by nearly 60 percent of voters. The first raise, from $8.05 to $10, will come in January. Tipped workers in one Arizona city are also getting some good news. Flagstaff voted to raise the tipped minimum wage to $15 by 2026. The federal tipped minimum wage has been $2.13 an hour since 1991. In Colorado and Maine, the minimum wage will be going to $12 by 2020 as well, with Maine including tipped workers—they’ll get to the full $12 by 2024, up from a current level of $3.75.

And then there’s Washington state, which before the minimum wage-raising movement of the past few years had the highest minimum wage of any state in the country but has gotten left behind even as two of its cities—Seattle and SeaTac—passed $15 minimum wages. On Tuesday, Washington voters said yes to $13.50 by 2020. Their minimum wage was slated to go from $9.47 to $9.53 on January 1, but instead it’ll go to $11.

That’s not all. The same measures that raised the minimum wage in Washington and Arizona also included paid sick leave. They will become the fifth and sixth states—after Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon—to require paid sick leave.

This is all good news for millions of workers. And workers will need any good news they can get under President Trump.

This article originally appeared at DailyKOS.com on November 10, 2016. Reprinted with permission.

Laura Clawson is a Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Labor editor since 2011.

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.