Minimum wage hike stalled in Utah Legislature

A bill that would have seen Utah’s minimum wage raised to $15 an hour by July 2026 died a partisan death in a Utah House committee prior to the end of the recent legislative session. HB284 stalled in the House Business and Labor Committee, meaning it was not brought to the House for debate or a vote. The committee vote — 10-3 along party lines — tabled the bill for this session.

The bill was sponsored by freshman Rep. Clare Collard, D-Magna, who told the committee that the proposal would affect about 19,000 Utahns who are now working for the current $7.25 per hour minimum wage, a figure that hasn’t raised since mandated by the federal government in 2008. Collard’s bill called for incremental increases over the next five years culminating in a $15 per hour wage in 2026.

But Republicans worried that the increases would kill jobs and hurt the economy. Representatives of the business community who spoke during the public comment period of the committee meeting argued that new minimum wage mandates would harm small businesses already hurting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The timing on this is just really, really difficult,” Dave Davis, president of the Utah Retail Merchants Association, told the panel. “We have small businesses, many of which are going through trying to recover from the pandemic and the economic effects of that. And this would crush those businesses.”

Other business representatives noted that a majority of businesses are paying more than the current minimum wage due to market pressures and a sparsity of available workers. They said that the economy should drive wages, not the government.

Collard’s bill came on the heels of a minimum wage debate raging in Washington. President Joe Biden wanted to include a $15 minimum wage to his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill.

Justifying his vote against the Utah measure, Cache Valley Republican Rep. Casey Snider, a Business and Labor Committee member, cited a fiscal analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office in Washington. The CBO said that, while hiking the minimum wage to $15 nationwide would lift an estimated 900,000 workers above the federal poverty level, it would also result in the loss of up to 1.5 million entry-level jobs.

Utah is one of 21 states that have not raised their minimum wage above the $7.25 federal standard.