Red-state blues

[sigma7]

The national minimum wage just got raised to an astronomical $5.85/hour.

The minimum wage in the state of Kansas? $2.65/hour, or about $6,000/year, and efforts to raise it have been stonewalled by the legislature. God, I didn't even earn that low a wage when I worked in radio.

Comments

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

The business has to pretty much stay entirely inside the state. Federal commerce laws are pretty much only enforced via the interstate commerce clause, after all...so a restaurant or lawn care business might get away with counting only as a state business.

That said, 19,000 people in Kansas work in jobs that slip through the cracks and are covered by this wage, but very few places actually pay less than federal minimum wage, simply because (at the moment) there's sufficient competition for workers.