Maryland State House
The state’s call for an increase in the minimum wage is picking up momentum, but it is still unclear to what extent on-campus student workers, who in many cases earn the federal minimum wage, will be affected.
After a more than five-hour House Economic Matters committee hearing Tuesday, there is no shortage of supporters and detractors for efforts to raise the state’s wage floor. Another hearing is slated for Monday before a Senate committee.
“It is expected that some form of minimum wage will be passed in this session,” University Human Resources Director Dale Anderson wrote in an email. “Student workers are likely to come under the provisions of the bill, but we will not know until the legislature has passed the bill.”
The main minimum wage bill, sponsored by House and Senate leaderships, would increase the floor on wages year-by-year, from the federally mandated level of $7.25 an hour to $8.20 an hour by July 1. By July 1, 2015, it will increase to $9.15 an hour and $10.10 an hour the year after that. From then on, it will be pegged to inflation and revised.
“If the minimum wage had just kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be a little above $10 now,” Gov. Martin O’Malley said at a Raise the Wage Rally last month in Annapolis. “If it had kept pace with worker productivity, it would be $20 an hour right now. If it had kept pace with the earnings of Ronald Reagan’s top 1 percent, it would be $273.”
In an interview with The Diamondback in December, Kelley Bishop, University Career Center and The President’s Promise director, said without a parallel increase in university funds, departments will have to make decisions about how they will pay their minimum wage personnel and student assistants. That could “either mean cutting back on hours for students assistants or having fewer student assistants,” she said.
“It certainly doesn’t mean that people are not going to have student assistants any more, but it may make them think about how many total hours,” Bishop said. “With any change like this, people make adjustments over time and then they kind of stop thinking about it.”
There is opposition to the main bill, known as the Maryland Minimum Wage Act of 2014, and some opponents are proposing alternatives. At a hearing Tuesday, Harford County Executive David Craig said it would be better to give counties their own autonomy in establishing these rates. Some jurisdictions are close to the borders of other states, Craig said, and forcing all counties to follow the same labor laws could force businesses out-of-state.
“Maryland’s geographically a little bit different than most of the states; most of our counties border a different state,” Craig said. “If we change this at the state level, it’s going to undermine many of our counties and their economy.”
An increase in minimum wage has topped the list of O’Malley’s initiatives this session, composing a large part of his January State of the State address. It comes a year after President Obama announced support for a federal increase in minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour, but O’Malley’s press office didn’t say whether the governor was attempting to seize on the political atmosphere after Obama made it a national issue. Representatives said it was a part of a much larger goal of the O’Malley administration to grow the state’s middle class.
“For us, the North Star for everything we’ve done in this administration is strengthening the middle class,” said O’Malley’s spokeswoman Nina Smith. “The minimum wage was just a natural progressive step.”
