This morning Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin introduced a bill that puts New Jersey’s minimum wage on a path to $15 an hour—but not for all workers. The bill would raise the minimum wage to $15 by January 2024, but exempts farm workers, seasonal workers, youth workers, and workers at businesses with ten or fewer employees from earning a $15 minimum wage until January of 2029—an 11 year phase-in.

BRANDON McKOY, NEW JERSEY POLICY PERSPECTIVE DIRECTOR OF GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS:

“This bill is an affront to the hundreds of thousands of workers who will be left behind from earning the full minimum wage and a chance to better support themselves and their families. Creating new exemptions in the minimum wage runs counter to the notion of equal pay for equal work and will further exacerbate income inequality by creating a sub-minimum wage underclass.

“It’s near impossible to survive in New Jersey on a minimum wage salary, and no worker is exempt from that chilling reality. Legislators seemed to understand this two years ago when they passed a $15 minimum wage bill without exemptions, only to see then-Governor Christie veto it. Since then, New Jersey’s cost of living has only risen, and the legislature’s commitment to alleviating poverty has not kept pace. This bill completely dismisses the seriousness of poverty and has the fingerprints of New Jersey’s business lobby all over it.

“Regarding tipped workers, this bill makes the gap between New Jersey’s tipped wage and the minimum wage, already one of the largest in the country at $6.72, even larger as it will be $9.87 once all is said and done. Tipped workers are already at an increased risk of having their wages stolen and being harassed and assaulted by customers whose tips they rely on; this bill does little to help them and heightens many of the serious problems they already face.”

New Jersey’s minimum wage, by the numbers (all data from NJPP’s October report, Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 is Critical to Growing New Jersey’s Economy):

• 1,047,000: Workers who would get a boost in pay by raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2023 (this represents 26.3 percent of the state’s workforce).
• $3.9 billion: The amount of money that would be injected into New Jersey’s economy, boosting communities and local businesses across the state (assuming no carve outs).
• 18.6 percent: Share of family income contributed by teen workers in households that earn less than $50,000 per year.
• 9 cents: Projected price increase—over four years—of a 6 ounce package of New Jersey-grown blueberries if farmworkers are properly included in the minimum wage increase.
• Zero: Counties where a single adult, without children, can make ends meet earning less than $15 per hour.
• 10 percent: New Jerseyans living below the federal poverty level (this is 16.3 percent higher than in 2007, before the Great Recession).