Fewer job openings in Minnesota pay less than $10 per hour.
Median wages for new retail salespeople, cooks, hotel clerks, home health aides, switchboard operators and security guards all edged across the $10 mark in 2015, according to the latest Job Vacancy Survey, the state's twice-annual report on the jobs that are available and what they pay.
Employers' modest sweetening of job offers will be cold comfort to most low-wage workers in the state. Three in five job openings still pay less than $15 per hour, a share of openings that has not changed for five years.
But it does mark a noticeable shift. Five years ago, more than a third of all available jobs in the state paid less than $10 per hour. At the end of 2015, only 13 percent, or 12,614, of open jobs paid so little.
The increase in the state minimum wage that started in 2014, and a tighter overall job market, have combined to lift low-end wages — not just for those earning minimum wage.
"It's pretty clear that those wages started to rise with the first minimum wage increase," said Oriane Casale, a labor market analyst for the state. "That's affecting a certain share of jobs at the very low end. It's also potentially pushing up the wages of $9 and $10 and $11 an hour jobs."
Minnesota's minimum wage rose to $8 per hour in August 2014, rose again to $9 per hour in August 2015, will rise again to $9.50 per hour in August, and starting in 2018 will be tied to inflation.
It's impossible to separate the effect of that legislative action from the effects of a low unemployment rate, which textbook supply and demand maxim suggests would lift wages, Casale said. She added, "The fact that the wages are increasing more consistently and more rapidly at that very lowest end now, just in conjunction with when the minimum wage started going into effect, I think is pretty clear evidence that that has had an impact."
