The Impacts of Living Wage Policies: Introduction to the Special Issue*

Since 1994, living wage laws have been passed and implemented in over 100 cities or other local governmental entities in the United States. 1 The typical local living wage law imposes a relatively high mandated wage standard—currently averaging more than $9 an hour—upon a relatively small number of employers—usually those working on service contracts with the city and (in about a fourth of the cities) those receiving financial assistance from the city. Major cities in the United States that have living wage laws include Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, Portland, Rochester, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis and Tucson. In all, the cities that have passed living wage laws comprise about two-fifths of the population of large U.S. cities. Campaigns for local or statewide living wage laws are also in varying stages of development in nearly 100 localities and in a dozen or more states. These community-based developments are often cited as the most striking progressive achievement in labor and employment policy in the past 25 years—a period of declining real wages for the bottom two-fifths of the earnings distribution. The successful attempts to set living wage standards contrast with attempts to increase the national minimum wage, the real level of which eroded in the 1980s and recovered only partly in the late 1990s. The term “living wage,” which is much more evocative than the term “minimum wage,” now appears commonly in public discourse. Living wage campaigns gained momentum throughout the 1990s, supported by improvements