Skip to main content

Why Does Delaware Have Training and Youth Wages Below Minimum Wage?

 Did you know that, for the last two years, it’s been legal to pay employees less than the state minimum wage? We’re not talking about tipped employees, either – though that is a separate issue that hasn’t been addressed since 1983.

In June 2018, Delaware’s Training Wage and Youth Wage were created as a bad-faith deal in the Delaware 149th General Assembly; an unsatisfactory compromise between the Democrats’ desire to continue increasing the state’s minimum wage based on cost-of-living increases to work toward a living wage, and the Republicans’ aim to protect businesses from increased costs of doing business.

The initial minimum wage bill, introduced in January 2017, called for the Delaware minimum wage to increase by 50 cents per year from 2017-2020, then to be increased based on cost-of-living adjustments after 2020. When the bill was ultimately defeated in March 2018, a new bill was introduced a week later to simply increase the state minimum wage by 50 cents per hour every year until 2021. The bill passed, but only in conjunction with a separate bill  that creates new wage categories for “Training” and “Youth”, allowing employers to pay new employees and employees under the age of 18 years, respectively, up to 50 cents less per hour than the minimum wage requires. The training wage rate and youth rate went into effect on January 1, 2019.

As a result of these bills, the current minimum wage in Delaware currently sits at $9.25 per hour, and there is no plan in place for further increases. With the training wage rate and youth wage rate in place, these employees now make only $8.75 per hour. By comparison, Maryland’s minimum wage is currently $11.75 per hour, New Jersey’s is $12 per hour, and New York’s is $12.50 per hour. The minimum wage in Pennsylvania is $7.25 per hour, matching the current federal minimum wage.

As a more meaningful comparison, the calculated living wage in Delaware - the hourly rate that someone must earn to support their household - is $12.60 per hour for a single adult. For a single adult with one child, that number jumps to $26.31 per hour. This means that a person now subjected to the Training Wage or Youth Wage earns less than 70% of Delaware’s living wage for a single adult, or about 33% the wage required to support themselves and one child.

Because the bill to create the Training Wage and Youth Wage was introduced and passed on the same day, people of the Delaware public had no opportunity to comment on the wage changes before they were passed. Since its passage, advocacy groups and labor organizations have loudly criticized the creation of these wage categories, arguing that those who fall in these lower-paid categories could be unfairly punished for things out of their control. For example, the Youth Wage directly harms school dropouts, 30% of whom must leave school to support their families, and some of whom earn over 50% of their family’s household income. Meanwhile, seasonal workers could now spend much of their short-duration employments earning the Training Wage, which would vastly affect their annual income.

On January 27, 2021, Democratic House member Kimberly Williams, along with 19 other representatives and eight senators, introduced House Bill 88 to categorically remove the Training Wage and Youth Wage. A committee hearing will be held on the bill within 12 legislative days of its introduction.

 

Take Action:

  • Call, write, or email your state legislators and tell them to support H.B. 88 to abolish the Training Wage and Youth Wage. You can look up contact information for your representatives at the “Who is My Legislator?” search on the Delaware General Assembly website.
  • Join the Delaware United Organizing Hub focused on abolishing the Training Wage and Youth Wage. For more information, visit their Facebook page or email DelawareUnited4All@gmail.com.

 

Read more:





Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is Food Insecurity?

  Food insecurity – defined by the USDA as “a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life” – has consequences greater than just hunger. When a person lacks a basic necessity such as food, they are often forced to make tough choices that negatively affect their living conditions, education, and health. In a 2014 study conducted by Feeding America, more than 65% of their households had to choose between food and utilities, transportation, or medical care. Nearly 80% of food-insecure people report stretching their food budget by purchasing cheap, unhealthy foods, leading to health issues such as obesity, gestational diabetes, anxiety, asthma, and anemia. Food insecurity is also linked to higher healthcare costs; a CDC study found that food-insecure adults spend an average of $1,834 more on annual healthcare than food-secure adults. Food insecurity typically accompanies other socio-economic stressors , such as low wages, poor housing conditions, depressio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is there more to life than XX and XY? Getting past the sexual binary

Transgender, nonbinary, intersex, and other queer individuals have more visibility today than ever. While many people have learned a lot about these communities and have accepted their identities, many people remain confused, or are hostile toward the idea of a person feeling that they were assigned the wrong sex at birth, or feeling they don’t belong to either sex. How can a person be assigned the wrong sex? How can there be anything other than male and female sexes? Most of us learned in school that there are two biological sexes, and they are controlled by two chromosomes X and Y. If a person has XX they will be female, and XY will be male. You may have even learned that it is the presence of the Y chromosome that makes someone male, so someone with an extra sex chromosome XXY would still be male. Unfortunately, like so many other things you learned in school, it turns out that your teachers did not tell you the whole story. Biological sex is actually a really complex subject, there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why we wouldn't have Pride celebrations without trans women of color

Last summer was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, and during Pride month many news outlets did a historical review of the events of June 28, 1969. While the fight for equality didn’t begin at Stonewall, the Stonewall Uprising did rouse people into action like never before, and has served as an important touchstone for activists to this day. What many stories failed to mention was that some of the key figures who fought back that night were trans women of color - and that for many years they were excluded from the movement they helped create. In New York City, Vice squad police officers routinely raided bars like the Stonewall Inn under the guise of liquor license violations in order to harass and arrest members of the LGBTQ+ community. The patrons that night were undoubtedly used to having the police come in and disrupt things, but this time bottles and bricks began to fly and police barricaded themselves inside the bar. Trans women of color like Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia...
Post a Comment
Read more