Minimum wage increase has helped the state economy

Maine Center for Economic Progress -Wage and employment gains during the first six months of 2017 reveal that Maine’s voter-approved minimum wage increase has not hurt the state’s economy as the referendum’s opponents warned it would. Instead, one year after the first minimum wage increase went into effect, available data suggest that the initiative is working as intended by helping to increase wages with no apparent adverse impact on employment.

According to MECEP analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, total wages in Maine grew by $587 million in the first half of 2017 compared with the first half of 2016. That’s a 4.7 percent year-over-year increase, the largest such increase since before the Great Recession.