Minimum wage rise ‘long overdue’ but will it be enough to live in Hawaii?

Members of the House and Senate appear determined to raise Hawaii’s $10.10 an hour minimum wage, perhaps as early as October, a boost that would allow 70-year-old Anthony Unciano to donate to her Catholic church and maybe a dress and something to buy. enjoy your meal.”

“It’s so expensive here,” Unciano said during her minimum-wage job at the Aliiolani Elementary School goodwill drop-off center in Kaimuki.

A raise for Unciano would mean, “I can donate to the church,” the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace on Fort Street Mall. “Maybe I can buy myself an affordable dress. Maybe I could buy good food that I enjoy more,” she added.

Unciano and her son live in Kalihi, where they share rent of $570 a month. Aside from a donation to her church, any increase in the Hawaiian minimum wage would help Unciano’s son, and maybe even allow her to afford this dress to make her feel “beautiful.”

Last week, the state Senate introduced legislation to raise the minimum wage to $12 an hour starting October 1 Senate bill 2018, the minimum wage would increase further to $15 per hour on January 1, 2024, and then to $18 per hour on January 1, 2026.

The Senate Committee on Labor, Culture and the Arts is scheduled to hear the SB 2018 on Monday, the same day House leaders are expected to introduce their minimum wage bill.

State Senator Kurt Fevella (R, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point) is the only Republican — and one of 21 of the legislature’s 25 state senators — to introduce the SB in 2018. He called an increase in the minimum wage “long overdue”.

Hawaii’s minimum wage was last increased from $9.25 to $10.10 an hour in 2018.

Earlier in the year, California became the first state to mandate a minimum wage of $15 an hour for companies with more than 25 employees, and followed suit, according to The. several other communities across the country with a minimum wage of $15 an hour to Associated Press.

More than 20 states also increased their minimum wages this year, but not by as much as $15. A handful of other states have no minimum wage laws, meaning low-income workers are only eligible for the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Several low-wage workers told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that raising the minimum wage in Hawaii would be welcome but would not significantly improve their financial situation:

“Any increase wouldn’t be as beneficial because the comfortable living wage just goes up,” said Logan Teachout, 18, who lives in a dorm on the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus and made $11 an hour last summer when he was at Ewa Pantry worked.

Haiqin He, 20, lives with her parents in Kalihi near Farrington High School and most recently worked as a cashier at Cooke Street Market, earning $10.50 an hour.

“All I know is that everything is getting more expensive,” she said. “Inflation has already picked up. Even if your wages go up, that doesn’t mean your expenses won’t go up.”

To add to the burden, He said her mother wants her to pay half of her tuition at Kapiolani Community College.

Before Nicole Perez Rodriguez, who also lives in a UH dorm, took a new job in January and was making $14 an hour, she found random jobs on Craigslist, all of which paid the Hawaiian minimum wage of $10.10 an hour paid.

Each raise would allow Rodriguez, 18, “not to take TheBus or save for things — things that some people take for granted,” she said. “And it would definitely help for little things like getting groceries.”

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, has concerns about the prospect of a minimum wage increase in Hawaii.

“We support efforts to help working families, but nearly doubling the state’s current minimum wage would likely do them more harm than good,” Keli’i Akina, the organization’s president and CEO, told Star-Advertiser in a statement.

“If Hawaiian companies struggling to recover from lockdowns are forced to pay significantly more for their entrants, they could choose to cut hours or positions, or stop hiring,” Akina said. “Studies have shown that these kinds of wage increases are likely to put people out of work or result in lower net wages, rather than raising anyone’s standard of living.

“A better and more effective way to help Hawaii’s struggling families would be to lower Hawaii’s cost of living by lowering taxes and reducing regulations that increase the cost of doing business, limit employment opportunities, and drive up housing costs.”

But Lisa Kimura, vice president of community impact at Aloha United Way, said families were already struggling even before the COVID-19 pandemic led to massive layoffs and at times the country’s highest unemployment rate.

A 2020 report on “ALICE” households — an acronym for asset-constrained, income-constrained, employed households, or households with incomes above the federal poverty line but below the basic cost of living — found that $18 an hour was the lowest possible wage represented people could make a living in Hawaii. The report was based on data from before the 2018 pandemic.

“That’s the survival budget, the bare minimum,” Kimura said. “This is money to pay for taxes, transport, telephone, utilities and childcare, certainly not fancy accommodation.”

She called the minimum wage hike “long overdue, especially for families with children. … In order for people to survive in this state and stay in this state and have the most basic minimum lifestyle, we simply need to raise the minimum wage to something that is sustainable.”

More recent data on the economic damage caused by COVID-19 to Hawaii’s low-income workers and their families is unavailable. But Kimura described the record volume of calls for help from across the islands to AUW Call Center 211 as “truly the best source of information to know up to the minute what’s going on in the community.”

Before the pandemic, the 211 emergency response center received about 1,200 calls a month. “It’s not uncommon to have that many in a single day these days,” Kimura said. “On average, we get as many calls in a week as we did in a month before COVID… The majority relates to requests for housing and shelter and the need for food has remained incredibly high.”

Sang-Hyop Lee, a fellow of the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and a professor of economics at the UH College of Social Sciences, said there wasn’t enough data available to determine how an increase in the Hawaiian minimum wage would affect both workers and employers would affect.

“There are so many questions,” he said. “Hawaii doesn’t have the data we need.”

So the arguments for and against raising the minimum wage this term will boil down to “political ideology,” Lee said. “Debate is healthy, but it should be based on scientific evidence.”

Ashley Yoshikawa, 21, understands both sides’ arguments. She lives in Waikiki and works as a student ambassador in Chaminade University’s admissions office, earning the minimum wage of $10.10 an hour while her mother runs a small business.

“I hear a lot about how the minimum wage affects them because for a lot of small businesses they can’t keep up with the wage increase like a bigger company can, which is understandable because they’re competing with these super big companies and chains that are doing it.” can afford to pay their workers more realistically,” Yoshikawa said. “It puts smaller companies at a disadvantage to the point that they may not even have the ability to operate.

“But I do think the minimum wage should be raised,” she said. “Not that I’m a penny-pincher, but every euro counts for me. Actually, that’s probably a lot of money for me, like $18 an hour.”