The Los Angeles City Council voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, up from the current $9 an hour, making the city the largest in the country to set a target that has gone from almost absurdly ambitious to mainstream in the span of a few years.
The bill, which will need to clear a final vote, passed by a margin of 14-1. It comes in the wake of similar measures in Seattle and San Francisco, and as cities including New York and Washington D.C. consider raising their minimum wages to $15 as well. All of the $15 minimum wages enacted thus far will be phased in over time — Los Angeles’s would start by stepping up to $10.50 by July 1 of 2016, and give businesses and nonprofits with fewer than 25 employees an extra year to comply.
The Secular Jurist 