The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to approve a plan to increase its gradually increase minimum wage to $15 an hour by July 2020. Currently, the minimum wage is $9 an hour, slated to increase to $10 an hour in January.
The move will affect roughly 567,000 workers in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city.
“This is a game changer,” Tsedeye Gebreselassie, an attorney for wage advocacy group National Employment Law Project, told the Huffington Post on Tuesday. “L.A. is such a huge city, and it’ll have a national impact on the normalization of $15 as the minimum wage.”
The city council passed the pay bump 14 to 1 after a debate that divided the city. Some businesses, including the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, warned the rise would hurt small companies and lead to layoffs.
Los Angeles joins other the likes of other West Coast cities such as Seattle and San Francisco, which have $15 minimum wages.
The federal minimum wage remains at $7.25 an hour.
