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The minimum wage in Pennsylvania is $7.25 an hour.
It has been at that level since 2009.
That’s too low and 10 years of stagnation at that amount is too long.
Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf and Republican Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman of Centre County seem to agree that it is time to raise the state’s minimum wage.
It’s the "how much" that they disagree on.
Corman said recently that he favors a “reasonable” increase in the minimum wage, though he would not define what "reasonable" means in dollars and cents.
Gov. Wolf has been more definitive. He wants the minimum wage upped to $12 an hour this year, which would make it one of the highest in the nation, with annual 50-cent hikes to bring it to $15 an hour in 2025.
In our view, while a minimum wage increase is long overdue and needs to be more than a nominal quarter, changes on the order Gov. Wolf is pushing would be disastrous for both employers and workers.
The state is made up mostly of relatively smaller businesses, not gargantuan corporations. The leaders of these businesses can’t make the bottom line work with an increase of nearly $5 an hour in the minimum wage.
They would be forced to raise not just entry level pay but the pay of a significant portion of their employee roll. The only way to accomplish that would be to reduce the number of employees.
The people most impacted by that forced necessity would be the very people a hike in the minimum wage is meant to benefit - entry-level workers, many of them young people just getting started in the workplace.
We urge the Legislature to approve a hike in the minimum wage. We also urge the governor to be more realistic about the amount of the hike in the minimum wage.
It would be nice if Pennsylvania could afford to have nearly the highest minimum wage in the country, but the impact on its employment and business picture would be catastrophic.