10-24-2021 Women to Watch - Flipbook - Page 38
earns $15,080 annually. When adjusted for rising cost
of living, those earnings are 18% less than what an
employee earned at the time of the last increase, or
$18,458 annually, EPI says.
Minimum wage increases disproportionately impact women because of a history of “occupational
segregation,” Cooper said, “the fact that certain jobs
were considered to be women’s work, and those jobs
have been disproportionately undervalued by society.”
In Maryland, a handful of employers have recently announced minimum hourly pay increases ahead
of the state mandate, saying they want to stay competitive or address pay inequity.
In early August, Morgan State University said it
was immediately adopting a $15 minimum wage for
hourly workers and planned to convert contract employees to full-time wages with benefits. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore’s largest private employer,
announced in May it planned to boost the minimum
wage at its university and health system to $15 an
hour. Hopkins’ hike, for full-time, temporary, student
and full-time contract workers, took effect July 1 for
university employees and will start Jan. 1 for health
system workers.
Morgan’s announcement said the university
hoped to “address employee inequity in a profound
and meaningful way at the state’s largest historically
Black university.” Johns Hopkins officials said they
raised minimum pay to enhance job opportunities
and recognize front-line workers, especially in the
lower-paid categories.
Baltimore-based Under Armour said in May it
plans to boost minimum wages to $15 per hour for
thousands of its hourly workers, a move it said is designed to keep the brand competitive in attracting
in-demand store and warehouse workers.
In February, Baltimore’s two largest art museums,
the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art
Museum, said they would increase minimum wage
to $15 an hour for their lowest-paid, full-time employees, including security guards.
And in January, LifeBridge Health, which includes
Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Northwest Hospital, Carroll Hospital and Grace Medical Center, raised the
minimum wage for more than 1,100 patient care,
environmental services and food service workers to
$15 an hour.
Other large private employers, including Amazon, Costco, Target and Walmart, already had boosted base wages to $15 an hour.
Such increases “can make a real meaningful difference in how someone can afford food or back-toschool clothes for kids or medication, and it can ease
some of the tough choices people have been faced
with in the course of the pandemic,” said Julie Vogtman, director of job quality and senior counsel for
the Washington-based National Women’s Law Center.
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In February, Baltimore’s two largest art museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art, left, and the Walters Art
Museum, said they would increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour for their lowest-paid, full-time employees, including security guards. BALTIMORE SUN PHOTOS
Currently, 30 states, including Maryland and
Washington, D.C., have a minimum wage above the
federal level. Increases are planned in 26 states plus
Washington, including some that will increase wages
to adjust for inflation.
As in Maryland, private employers around the
country are reassessing their pay scales, either because they are forced to by local or state mandates
or because of demand for workers, Cooper said. He
said some aren’t waiting for mandates to take affect
and are instituting raises in the hopes of attracting a
better pool of applicants.
But worker advocates say more employers, including in Maryland, need to step up with higher
minimums.
“We can’t wait for 2025 for the increase to $15 an
hour,” said Cherrish Vick, secretary/treasurer of AFSCME Council 3, which represents some 30,000 state,
county and municipal workers at a range of agencies
and universities in Maryland. “For those workers
making less than $15 an hour, it is not enough to support a family, and they have had to take second jobs,
gig work or federal assistance.”
Many of those low-wage earners are single mothers who have been faced with increased costs in
child care and other expenses, she said.
The union has been able to negotiate raises for
members at Morgan State and is urging the rest of
the University System of Maryland to follow in areas
such as housekeeping, “which we know is predominantly women working in those positions and women of color,” Vick said.
Aisha Ruffin, a 39-year-old East Baltimore resident who works in housekeeping at the University of
Maryland Baltimore’s Campus Center, has watched
expenses such as health care rise. Still, her pay has
remained at $13.75 an hour since 2019.
“It was a challenge coming every day” during the
pandemic, Ruffin said. “We were out there putting
our lives on the line.”
She supplemented her income with a second job
at Amazon for a few months, but the work became
too physically demanding. Now she competes with
other workers at the university to take on overtime
shifts, and a grown daughter helps pay family expenses from her job.
“We just try to figure it out,” she said of paying
bills each month.
If the federal Raise the Wage Act passes, it would
help women by doing away with a tiered minimum
wage structure, proponents of the act say. Under the
current structure, employers can pay restaurant
servers and others who earn tips a minimum of
$2.13 at the federal level or $3.63 an hour in Maryland. Maryland’s 2019 phased wage increase does not
increase that tipped minimum rate.
Currently, if tips fail to bring weekly earnings to
the regular minimum wage rate, an employer must
pay workers the difference.
Proponents of “One Fair Wage,” or paying the
same rate to both tipped and regular hourly workers, say the tipped minimum structure is often difficult to enforce and can shortchange workers. And
tipped workers often are women, who make up 70%
of the category.
The gender pay gap for women in states with a
single minimum wage is 33% smaller than in states
with the $2.13 tipped minimum wage, according to
the National Women’s Law Center. Poverty rates are
30% lower.
When minimum wages go up, the pay gap between men and women narrows, experts said. States
with higher minimum wages have smaller genderbased wage gaps, Vogtman said.
“Our society has devalued the work that women
do, especially the work that Black and Latina women
do,” Vogtman said. “Raising the minimum wage can
have an impact on those gaps.”