As the clock struck midnight on Monday, January 1st 2024, about 150,000 Nebraskans got a pay raise.
In November 2022, Nebraska voters took to the voting booth, and approved the Minimum Wage Increase Initiative (Initiative 433). The citizen-initiated ballot measure would increase the state’s minimum wage to $15.00 by 2026. At the time, the minimum wage was $9.00 per hour in Nebraska, and had been since 2016. To ease into the new wage floor, minimum employee pay would increase each year by $1.50.
This followed months later into 2023, with the wage rising to $10.50, and now workers are sitting at $12.00 into the new year of 2024. Next year, 2025, the minimum wage will jump to $13.50, and then the final spelled out wage number of $15.00 in 2026.
The ballot measure received wide support from voters, who approved the statute change with 58.66% voting YES and 41.34% voting NO.
The advocacy organization ‘National Employment Law Project’ shared a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute from 2019 indicating that 150,000 Nebraskans work for minimum wage.
The measure also sought to avoid a short sighted solution to, the often stagnate, minimum wage bargaining. After $15.00 is reached in 2026, the Nebraska’s minimum wage will be adjusted each year based on increases to the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for the Midwest Region, or more simply, the cost of living.
KLIN News spoke with the Executive Director of the Nebraska Hospitality Association Zoe Olson about how these wage increases might affect business operations in her sector. “Even when it went into effect a year ago, it didn’t affect us,” she shared. “With the unemployment rate as low as it is in Nebraska, we’re already paying over that for starting wages. So it really is not going to impact as much as people think it is because we’ve had to be paying wages higher than that for quite a while.”
On whether these increases could overall raise the price of goods on consumers, Olson said food prices are trending high right now on their own, independent of wage costs. Really hitting business-owners in the pocket books right now, according to Olson, are “the credit card swipe fees that Mastercard and Visa takes for processing cards. That’s actually higher than what most business owners are paying for health insurance right now… That’s why we’re working to try to get Congress to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. That’s huge for us.”
Explaining further, “If [a business] takes a credit card, they have to pay it. It’s a duopoly between Visa and Mastercard. They can charge whatever they want…and they do. It’s one of the biggest costs in our businesses now, above health care and in some businesses, it’s even above what they pay for labor.”