Minimum wage hike ‘long overdue’ but will it be enough to live in Hawaii?

Members of the state House and Senate appear committed to raising Hawaii’s minimum wage of $10.10 an hour perhaps as soon as October, a boost that would enable 70-year-old Anthony Unciano to donate to her Catholic church and maybe buy a dress and some “good food.”

“It’s so expensive here,” Unciano said while at her job at the Goodwill drop-off site at Aliiolani Elementary School in Kaimuki, where she earns $10.75 an hour.

A pay increase for Unciano would mean “I can donate to church,” the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace at Fort Street Mall. “Maybe I can buy an affordable dress. Maybe I could buy good food that I will enjoy more,” she added.

Unciano and her son live in Kalihi, where they share rent of $570 a month. Other than donating to her church, any rise in Hawaii’s minimum wage would go to help Unciano’s son and maybe even allow her to splurge on that dress so she can feel “beautiful.”

Last week the state Senate introduced a bill to boost the minimum wage to $12 an hour starting Oct. 1. Under Senate Bill 2018, the minimum wage would further increase to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2024, and then to $18 an hour on Jan. 1, 2026.

The Senate Committee on Labor, Culture and the Arts is scheduled to hear SB 2018 on Monday, the same day House leadership is expected to introduce its minimum wage bill.

State Sen. Kurt Fevella (R, Ewa Beach-Iroquois Point) is the lone Republican — and one of 21 out of the Legislature’s 25 state senators — to introduce SB 2018. He called an increase in the minimum wage “long overdue.”

Hawaii’s minimum wage was last increased, to $10.10 an hour from $9.25, in 2018.

At the start of the year, California became the first state to require a $15-an-hour minimum wage for businesses with more than 25 employees, joining several other communities across the country with a $15-an-hour minimum wage, according to The Associated Press.

More than 20 states also raised their minimum wages this year, but not as high as $15. A handful of other states have no minimum wage laws, meaning low-income employees are entitled only to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

Several low-wage workers told the Honolulu Star-­Advertiser that increasing Hawaii’s minimum wage would be welcomed but would not significantly improve their financial situation:

“Any increase wouldn’t be that beneficial because the comfortable living wage is only increasing,” said Logan Teachout, 18, who lives in a dorm on the University of Hawaii-Manoa campus and last summer earned $11 an hour working at Ewa Pantry.

Haiqin He, 20, lives with her parents in Kalihi near Farrington High School and most recently worked as a cashier at Cooke Street Market, where she was paid $10.50 an hour.

“All I know is that everything is getting more expensive,” she said. “Inflation has already increased. Even though your wage is increased, that doesn’t mean that your expenses are not going to increase.”

Adding to the strain, He said her mother wants her to pay half of her tuition at Kapiolani Community College.

Before landing a new job in January earning $14 an hour, Nicole Perez Rodriguez, who also lives in a UH dorm, found random jobs on Craigslist that all paid the Hawaii minimum wage of $10.10 an hour.

Any pay increase would enable Rodriguez, 18, to “not take TheBus or save up for things — things that some people take for granted,” she said. “And it would definitely help for small things, like getting groceries.”

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization, has concerns about the prospect of increasing Hawaii’s minimum wage.

“We support efforts to help working families, but nearly doubling the state’s current minimum wage would likely hurt more than help them,” Keli‘i Akina, the organization’s president and CEO, told the Star-Advertiser in a statement.

“If Hawaii businesses that are struggling to recover from the lockdowns are forced to pay significantly more for their entry-level employees, they might choose to cut hours or positions, or stop hiring,” Akina said. “Studies have shown that this type of wage hike is likely to throw people out of work or result in lower net take-home pay, rather than increase anyone’s standard of living.

“A better, more effective way to help Hawaii’s struggling families would be to lower Hawaii’s cost of living by cutting taxes and decreasing regulations that add to the cost of business, limit employment opportunities and drive up the cost of housing.”

But Lisa Kimura, vice president of community impact at Aloha United Way, said families already were struggling even before the COVID-19 pandemic led to massive layoffs and, at one point, the highest unemployment rate in the nation.

A 2020 report on “ALICE” households — an acronym for asset-limited, income-­constrained, employed, or households with income above the federal poverty level but below the basic cost of living — found that $18 an hour represented the lowest possible pay people could eke out a living on in Hawaii. The report was based on pre-pandemic data from 2018.

“That’s the survival budget, the absolute minimum,” Kimura said. “That’s money to pay taxes, transportation, phone, utilities and child care, certainly not fancy housing.”

She called raising the minimum wage “long overdue, especially for families with children. … For people to survive in this state and stay in this state and have the most basic, minimum lifestyle, we simply must increase the minimum wage to something that’s sustainable.”

More recent data on the economic damage from COVID-19 on Hawaii’s low-­income workers and their families isn’t available. But Kimura called the record volume of calls for help from around the islands to AUW’s 211 call center “really the best source of information to know up to the minute what’s going on in the community.”

Pre-pandemic, the 211 center received about 1,200 calls a month. “Nowadays it’s not uncommon to have that many in a single day,” Kimura said. “On average, we receive as many calls in one week as we got in a month pre-COVID … . The majority are for housing and shelter requests, and the need for food has stayed incredibly high.”

Sang-Hyop Lee, a fellow with the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization and professor of economics in the UH College of Social Sciences, said there isn’t enough data available to determine how increasing Hawaii’s minimum wage would affect both employees and employers.

“There are so many questions,” he said. “Hawaii doesn’t have the data we need.”

So the arguments for and against raising the minimum wage this legislative session will come down to “political ideology,” Lee said. “Debate is healthy, but it should be based on scientific information.”

Ashley Yoshikawa, 21, understands the arguments from both sides. She lives in Waikiki and works in the admissions office at Chaminade University as a student ambassador, earning the minimum wage of $10.10 an hour while her mother runs a small business.

“I hear a lot about how minimum wage impacts her because, for a lot of small businesses, they can’t keep up with raising pay like a larger corporation can, which is understandable because they’re competing against these super large companies and chains that can afford to pay their workers more realistically,” Yoshikawa said. “It leaves smaller businesses at a disadvantage to a point where they might not be able to even have the option to be running.

“But I do think that the minimum wage should be increased,” she said. “Not that I’m a penny-pincher but to me, every dollar matters. Actually, to me, that’s probably a lot of money to be, like, $18 an hour.”