A new push to raise the national minimum wage to $25 an hour for all workers may be facing a long road.
But the Living Wage for All Act, the first legislation introduced by U.S. Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-11) last week, did return a spotlight on questions that continue to go unanswered by supporters of such proposed mandates.
Like what about organic wage growth for starters?
“We’re talking about entry-level positions,” NJBIA President and CEO Michele Siekerka told host Eric Scott on his Jersey Thing show on NJ101.5 this week.
“The idea of an entry-level job is you get in, you increase your skills and your time in the position, and you rise, and you promote.”
“When you build your skills, you build your income. That's a known fact. Entry-level positions are there for a reason: To get people in the door. And then we need to grow workers up organically.”
Another non-artificial means to growing wages, Siekerka said, was the concept of supply and demand.
Siekerka noted how during the workforce shortage found for many businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic raised wages naturally, with many employers raising wages beyond $15 an hour well before the state was mandated to reach that level on Jan. 1, 2024.
Siekerka reminded Scott that employers historically “pay what they can afford,” in order to be competitive.
In NJBIA's 2026 Business Outlook Survey, 77% of surveyed New Jersey business owners and upper-level managers said that business affordability had declined over the past five years. And that's affected their ability to increase wages.
In 2025, only 17% of businesses increased their employees' pay by 5% or more. That's down 17 percentage points, or half, from just two years earlier.
But it’s not just the “employee on the rise” that a business has to concern itself with – it’s also the other staff.
“When we artificially inflate the minimum wage, what we also do is we push up compression upward,” Siekerka told Scott. “So now, what was before the $26-an-hour job is going to become a $30-an-hour job for that person. And that just pushes all the way up the line.
“In certain situations, it might put our most vulnerable population also at risk, if you’re talking about the operating budget of a childcare center or an eldercare facility.”
“Another critical thing we need to keep in mind is the tourism industry here in the state of New Jersey. Seasonal work, right? That comprises a huge part of our income here, and teen workers. Are we really going to not have any exemptions for teen workers,” Siekerka added.
The odds would seem long for a $25 per hour minimum wage to any time soon. In 2023 and in 2025, the Raise the Wage Act to make the minimum wage $17 per hour, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, fell well short.
That bill also included tipped workers, youth workers, and people with disabilities.
