Crossing Borders for Higher State Minimum Wages---how small hourly increases can change lives.
Crossing Borders for Higher State Minimum Wages
By KIRK JOHNSON
Higher pay in Washington and Oregon is luring workers from Idaho, showing how small hourly increases can change lives.
"Everything is paid for, and that is a luxury in itself." Jackie Heintzelman, who said keeping up with bills was easier since she started driving from Idaho to work at the Little Palomino, a restaurant and bar in Ontario, Ore. Kyle Green for The New York Times
ONTARIO, Ore. — Carly Lynch dreams of a life one day on the professional rodeo circuit, but for now she commutes 20 miles from Idaho to this small city in eastern Oregon to work as a waitress. There are restaurant jobs closer to home, but she is willing to drive the extra miles for a simple reason: Oregon’s minimum wage is $1.85 higher per hour than Idaho’s.
“It’s a big difference in pay,” said Ms. Lynch, 20, who moved last summer from her parents’ home in Boise, 30 miles farther east, to make her Oregon commute more bearable. “I can actually put some in the bank.”
In the nation’s debate about the minimum wage, which President Obama has proposed increasing at the federal level to $10.10 from $7.25, this rolling borderland of onion farms and strip malls provides a test tube of sorts for observing how the minimum wage works in daily life, and how differences in the rate can affect a local economy in sometimes unexpected ways.
Ms. Lynch is one of the many minimum-wage migrants who travel from homes in Idaho, where the rate is $7.25, to work in Oregon, where it is the second highest in the country, $9.10. Similar migrations unfold every day in other parts of Idaho — at the border with Washington, which has the highest state minimum, $9.32, and into Nevada, where the minimum rate tops out at $8.25.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/crossing-borders-and-changing-lives-lured-by-higher-state-minimum-wages.html?hp&_r=0