The mayor of Syracuse, New York, raised the minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour on Wednesday, a move that will be effective immediately.
The move by Mayor Stephanie Miner (D) will affect more than 60 employees and will cost $222,432 each year, according to Syracuse.com. The minimum wage in New York state is currently set at $8.75, but Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is pushing for a statewide minimum wage of $15 an hour, a number that he had initially said was too high. In July, New York raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour statewide in a measure that will be phased in by 2018 in New York City and 2021 in the rest of the state.
According to Census data released last year, Syracuse was the 23rd poorest city in the country with 34.6 percent of the population living in poverty between 2009 and 2013.
Miner told the New York Times that the increase would help boost her city's economy.
“This is an investment in the people who work here that will inure to the benefit of their families and the local economy,” she told the Times. “I do know that it will benefit those families. They may have pizza on a Friday night where they didn’t before, or they may buy an extra pair of shoes for their kids to wear to school.”
Last year, Cuomo opposed allowing local municipalities to set their own individual minimum wages because he said that it would cause different places to compete against one another. After initially proposing to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour in New York City and $10.50 an hour in the rest of the state in January, Cuomo announced that he would support a $15 statewide minimum wage last month.
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