New Florida Minimum Wage
Yesterday, Florida apparently passed a new minimum wage $1.00 higher than the Federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour.
This is actually an oddity - a red state with a higher minimum wage. Before the election, this Department of Labor map, showing the states with minimum wages higher than the Federal rate (shown in green) looked a lot like the presidential election map. With the exception of Alaska (which has price and wage levels so different from the lower 48 that it should have its own currency) all the states with higher than federal minimum wages are also strong Kerry states (e.g. Left Coast, New England and Illinois).
This is going to have huge implications for us. Camping is a low margin business, and most hosts are paid minimum wage. In fact, many of our hosts, who are retired, don't want to get paid at all, so they don't mess with their social security, but that of course is not possible. The total increase in wages will be higher than what we make in Florida, so we are going to be spending a lot of time evaluating price increases vs. cutting back on labor somehow.
UPDATE
I see from our logs we are getting a lot of hits on this post from search engines. For those of you looking for more information on the implementation of this increase, we still have not seen any enabling regulation to go along with it. Will it have the same exemptions as the Federal law? Anyway, the go-live date is apparently 6 months from approval, which I presume equates to early April, 2005.
