My mother took a job making the minimum wage in 1985, $3.35 an hour – 2026 value: $10.17 an hour – and that was what she had to raise two kids on, because my father didn’t pay the court-ordered child support, because he was an ass.
Republicans are throwing a fit because Gov. Abigail Spanberger just signed legislation to raise the minimum wage in Virginia from the $12.77-per-hour rate that went into effect on Jan. 1 to $13.75 per hour next Jan. 1, and then $15 per hour on Jan. 1, 2028.
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“Economists have been clear for decades: drastic wage hikes like this kill jobs and shutter businesses,” said Rebekah Paxton, the research director at something called the Employment Policies Institute, which sounds important, until you find out, via SourceWatch.org, that this EPI is just a front for a DC lobbyist named Rick Berman, who, before his retirement in 2022, made his living shilling for a variety of business groups that benefit from a lower minimum wage – hotels, restaurants, the alcohol and tobacco industries.
“While advocates claim this bill will solve the affordability crisis, economic data shows it stands to make the problem worse. Instead putting thousands of Virginians out of work, and pushing the cost of living even higher in the Commonwealth,” said Paxton, who has another job title – as vice president for data analytics at Berman and Company, an Arlington-based PR firm that shares an address, down the suite number, with EPI.
Which is all well and good – certain sectors need to be able to exploit their workers, and they hire PR people to craft spin and get their positions out there in front of dumb reporters who are good at Control-c and Control-V, but not at critical thinking.
For an opposing view on the issue, we turn to MIT, where folks have built and make publicly available a handy, dandy Living Wage Calculator – which tells us that a single adult with no kids in Augusta County needs to earn $22.92 an hour to be at a “living wage” level, and a single adult with two kids would need to make $45.92 an hour, or $95,513.60 a year.
My mom, back in 1985, making $3.35 an hour, a single adult with two kids, would have earned, before taxes, $6,968 – in today’s dollars: $21,162.06.
No wonder we were broke all the time.
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“Today, we are putting more money in the pockets of Virginia workers,” said Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who signed the minimum wage bill into law on Thursday.
“If you work full time in Virginia, you should be able to afford to live in Virginia,” Spanberger said. “You should be able to keep up with your rent or mortgage, fill your medications, and save for your kids’ futures.”
State Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, the real power in Richmond, got straight to the point with her statement on the new minimum wage law.
“For too long, hardworking Virginians have been stretching their paychecks to the breaking point – choosing between keeping the lights on and putting food on the table. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not a gift – it is long overdue justice for the men and women who keep this Commonwealth running every single day,” Lucas said.
It’s almost like she has personal experience there.
“What I find troubling,” Lucas continued, and, gotta love her for who she is, and what she does, and how she does it, “is that we have colleagues who will fight tooth and nail to hand out tax exemptions to data center corporations – billion-dollar operations that don’t need our charity – but balk at giving a working mother a few more dollars an hour.”
A January poll from Christopher Newport University had it at 78 percent of Virginians supporting raising the minimum wage.
For some reason, Republicans were 51 percent against the increase in that CNU poll – Democrats were 97 percent in favor; independents were 77 percent in favor.
The bulk of the Republican voter base is closer to the minimum wage than they are to the wages Berman and Company and Employment Policies Institute pay their folks.
And yet these low-wage Republican voters keep casting their lots with people who side with the already super-wealthy.
Makes no sense to me.
But that’s why the minimum wage bill that Spanberger signed into law today only passed by a 20-19 vote in the State Senate earlier this year; remember next year when you’re voting here locally in the Chris Head vs. Whoever the Democrats Run Against Him race in the Third Senate District that he voted against the minimum-wage increase.
For that matter, I’ll make sure to remind our local readers that Ellen McLaughlin voted against the proposed increase in the House when she’s running for re-election in the 36th House District next year as well.
And then, there’s Tony Wilt, who won re-election in the 34th House District in 2025 by a scant 257 votes over Democratic challenger Andrew Payton.
I’ll do my part to ensure that Wilt comes to regret casting his lot on this the way he did.
Payton is gearing up for a rematch in the 2027 cycle; expect his campaign to remind folks that Wilt voted against their interests, early and often, next fall.
The MIT Living Wage Calculator tells us a single adult with two kids in Augusta County needs to make $13.13 an hour to be at the “poverty wage” level.
The $3.35 an hour she made in 1985, again, is $10.17 an hour today.
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Chris Graham
