Iowa Lawmakers Cap Minimum Wage Increases for Commercial Casino Workers

Lawmakers inwards IA experience passed an appropriations step that overhauls minimum earnings requirements for workers at the state’s 19 commercial message casinos.

Under electric current law, casino workers paid past the minute must take in 25 percent to a greater extent than the federal lower limit wage. With the federal minimum salary currently $7.25 per hour, gambling casino workers in IA must take in at to the lowest degree $9.06 per hour.

But a bank note that passed the IA Legislature unanimously shoemaker's last hebdomad amends that stipulation, and it’s non to the workers’ benefit. Senate File 615, a vizor that includes various odds and ends that didn’t create it into other pieces of legislation, makes the $9.06 minimum pay for gaming manufacture employees permanent.

It is the spirit of the full general assembly that employees live paid at to the lowest degree 25 percent to a higher place the federal lower limit wage spirit level in essence on December 31, 2020,” SF 615 reads.

The amendment alters “Division VII — Gambling” of the Ioway Code.

What’s It Mean?

Earlier this year, Democrats inward Congress introduced legislation — House Resolution 603 — to step-up the federal minimum earnings to $15 past 2025. Independent analysis conducted by the Economic Policy Institute found that HR 603 would step-up payoff for nearly 32 meg Americans.

According to the US Department of Labor, if a worker is employed in a province that has its have minimum remuneration law, that somebody is entitled to the higher of the II lower limit wages. Iowa’s minimum wage currently stands at $7.25.

The appropriations proviso on Hawkeye State gambling casino workers strips such employees from receiving the federal minimum wage should it increase, though HR 603 has stalled inward the US House of Representatives.

If the appropriations amount had non passed the Ioway Legislature, cassino workers would be entitled to 125 percent of the federal lower limit wage. If the feds make at some point increase the minimum wage to $15, that substance Ioway gaming industry workers would get stood to pull in a minimum of $18.75 per hour.

Backers of exit the amendment say such a mandatory hourly rate tramp would devastate casinos. The Hawkeye State Gaming Association says prior to the pandemic, state casinos employed just about 8,800 people, with an yearbook paysheet of more than $293.6 million.

That list comes out to nearly $33,363 per person, per year. On a 40-hour act week, that equates to rough $16 an hour.

Little Opposition

During in conclusion week’s debate on the appropriations bill, only ane lawmaker — Rep. Chris Granville Stanley Hall (D-Sioux City) — verbalized occupy regarding the lower limit pay off cap.

Maintaining a depression bag of wages for a important number of people in the employment of casinos is sending the legal injury signal,” Granville Stanley Hall told KIWA Radio.

“The client stand that casinos attract and the challenges that these workers demand to turn to at work on on a day-after-day groundwork tin be pretty complex,” Charles Martin Hall added. “It is also the only when surround that workers get to turn in the country of IA inwards which they’re subjected to a workplace with baccy smoke.”

Hall’s territory includes where the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Sioux City is located.

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