There's some good news for Ohio’s minimum wage workers. Their pay goes up by 15 cents an hour starting today January 1st.
The new state minimum wage will rise to $8.30 an hour. But researcher Michael Shields with the progressive think tank Policy Matters Ohio isn’t calling this a raise in pay for Ohio’s lowest paid workers.
“It’s definitely beneficial. It is a safeguard so it stops the lowest earners in Ohio from losing ground but it’s not really an effective bump.”
Shields says the raise is really an inflation adjustment. A 2006 minimum wage ballot issue made the small increase possible. But Shields says Ohio’s low and middle income workers have lost ground financially since 1968, though the economy has grown by more than two-thirds in that half-century.
