Progress Illinois

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s proposal to lift the city’s hourly minimum wage to $13 would leave out approximately 65,000 low-wage workers who are mostly women and people of color.

That’s according to a new Center for Popular Democracy report, which compared the potential impacts of the mayor’s $13 minimum wage plan with a competing $15 minimum wage ordinance introduced in late May by a group of aldermen, including members of the council’s Progressive Reform Caucus. 

The proposed $13 ordinance specifically “shortchanges” domestic and tipped workers, the majority of whom are women of color, according to the report.

The Raise Chicago coalition, which supports the $15 plan, released the report’s findings at a City Hall press conference Wednesday morning. More low-wage Chicago workers would be covered by the $15 plan, which would also almost double the economic impact for the city compared to the $13 measure, the report found.

“With the opportunity to nearly double the economic growth of people across the city, our Raise Chicago ordinance would help propel people towards financial stability, help this city and state with tax revenues, and its effects would ripple through every community in Chicago,” said Action Now Executive Director Katelyn Johnson, a Raise Chicago leader. “The mayor’s proposal does not do enough to address the needs of Chicagoans and, in fact, will keep people living paycheck to paycheck.”

The “widespread” problem of wage theft in America might be costing U.S. workers more than $50 billion annually, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

EPI researchers came to the $50 billion estimate based on the findings of a separate, 2008 survey of front-line workers in low-wage industries in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. In the three major cities, workers in low-wage industries experienced close to $3 billion in total annual wage theft, which includes paying employees less than the minimum wage and failing to pay for overtime.

“Survey evidence suggests that wage theft is widespread and costs workers billions of dollars a year, a transfer from low-income employees to business owners that worsens income inequality, hurts workers and their families, and damages the sense of fairness and justice that a democracy needs to survive,” the EPI report states. “If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.”