Chicago’s minimum wage $15 an hour?

Chicago may have some good news as the minimum wage of the city could be $15 an hour. A new economic study has given this suggestion for the city to help in improving the living standards of the workers. This suggestion is also given to stay ahead of the state as it would move to the new level in 2025.

The Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute has released “Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 by 2021: Effects on Incomes, Employment, and Prices” on Thursday. The project has found that increasing the minimum wage to $15 will not increase the paychecks for low-income workers but will also help in bringing thousands of Chicagoans out of poverty.

The first major policy initiative passed through the General Assembly by Gov. Pritzker has made a historic decision to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour but this payrise will not happen this year as it is a yearly increment. The current minimum wage is $8.25 an hour which will increase to $9.25 with the new year. It will increase to $10 next summer, then an annual $1 rise till reaching $15 in 2025.

Legislation had passed five years implemented step-by-step which made the city’s minimum wage to $13 an hour in July. According to the study, the Chicago ordinance has the capacity for allowing the additional inflationary increase. However, this increment is capped from year to year. According to this limitation, “As a result, the city’s minimum wage cannot rise to $15 per hour until 2025 at the earliest, and may not reach $15 per hour until after the rest of Illinois.”

The study co-author and UIUC Professor Robert Bruno, head of the Project for Middle Class Renewal says that is costlier to live in the city of Chicago. He also added, “There has been a movement to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 per hour over the next two years to boost the purchasing power of Chicago workers.”