Yesterday, 8 Democratic or nominally Independent Senators, Joe Manchin (WV), Jon Tester (MT), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Maggie Hassan (NH), Chris Coons (DE), Tom Carper (DE), and Angus King (ME), voted against a doomed amendment to the COVID relief bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour.1 If you believed twitter in the hours afterwards, those eight senators, but mostly Kyrsten Sinema, stopped a policy that a majority of states have already adopted. The problem is that this is nowhere close to true. A $15 minimum wage is relative rare in 2020. There are no states that currently have a $15 minimum wage, and the only non-state first level administrative unit with one is Washington, DC.2
To show this, I mapped the minimum wage by state, county, and city.
States and local governments have been proactive in the past few years to start raising the minimum wage. These efforts have only lead to a $15 or higher minimum wage in the following cities:
Alameda, California
Belmont, California
Berkeley, California
Chicago, Illinois
Cupertino, California
Daly City, California
El Cerrito, California
Emeryville, California
Flagstaff, Arizona
Fremont, California
Los Altos, California
Los Angeles, California
Malibu, California
Menlo Park, California
Milpitas, California
Mountain View, California
New York, New York
Novato, California
Oakland, California.
Palo Alto, California
Pasadena, California
Redwood City, California
Richmond, California
San Francisco, California
San Jose, California
San Leandro, California
San Mateo, California
Santa Clara, California
Santa Monica, California
Santa Rosa, California
Seattle, Washington
Sunnyvale, California
Washington, District of Columbia
If you have no idea where a city is, assume that it is a small municipalities in the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles County.
It needed 60 votes to be included. If it passed it would have hung up the COVID relief bill due to the mindboggling nature of the senate reconciliation rules.
A number of states are climbing to a $15, but none have reached it yet.