California Gov. Jerry Brown officially signed a bill into law on Monday to make state minimum wage $15 an hour by 2022. The state will bump up its minimum wage to $10 an hour by next year, $11 an hour in 2018, and add an hourly raise of $1 until 2022 barring an economic recession.
The legislation received no Republican support, with the executive director of the state's branch of the National Federation of Independent Business, Tom Scott, saying the $15 hour minimum will have a "devastating [impact] on small business in California."
For The Week, however, Jeff Spross argued that the $15 minimum has found a perfect testing ground in the Golden State. "California isn't a single city like Seattle; it's a huge state with lots of different labor markets, from Silicon Valley to downtown Los Angeles to small town farming […] We'll be able to see how lots of different labor markets in California are affected, along with lots of different categories of workers: those without college degrees, those under 25 years of age, and so forth."
There are around 2.2 million Californians who currently earn minimum wage.
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