At $14.25 per hour, Massachusetts’ state minimum wage is among the highest in the country. By January, it will reach $15, completing years of scheduled increases agreed to by labor groups, business leaders, a Democratic-led Legislature, and a Republican governor.
Rarely, if ever, has the state’s legally enshrined wage floor emerged as a question on the campaign trail this year. That is, until Wednesday, when Democrat Maura Healey claimed — twice — during her first gubernatorial debate with Republican Geoff Diehl that he would target it.
“My opponent wants to take away minimum wage,” the attorney general charged, raising the specter of a Hobbesian work landscape, where someone could work 40 hours for just pennies.
But Diehl has not expressly campaigned on such a promise, nor does his lean slate of policy pledges include one. His campaign on Thursday called such a suggestion “ridiculous.” Totally eliminating a minimum wage on a state level is also effectively impossible with a federal minimum in place.
“Of course she’s trying to paint me as a typical Republican that just wants to cut everything from government,” Diehl said Thursday in an interview with WRKO host Jeff Kuhner, a Diehl supporter on whose show the former Whitman state lawmaker regularly appears.
Yet, there was a time when Diehl supported dropping the state’s minimum wage. Amid a debate over a 2014 bill that raised the state’s wage floor from $8 to $11, Diehl submitted, and later withdrew, an amendment in the House that would repeal the state wage floor and adopt the federal hourly minimum, which was then, and still is, $7.25.
Healey’s campaign pointed to the proposal to back up her assertion.
The amendment was one in a series Diehl filed to the bill, according to an analysis of his legislative record compiled by Instatrac, a legislative tracking service. Diehl also sought to exempt restaurants and small businesses from the wage increases, delay the hikes by a year, and eliminate increases for tipped employees.
He withdrew those, too, before there was any debate or vote on them. Scrapping amendments can be a common practice in the state Legislature where major bills can draw dozens, if not hundreds, of proposed changes but only a fraction pass.
Diehl ultimately voted against the bill. He also voted against a 2018 law known as the “grand bargain” that hiked the wage floor to its current level as part of a sweeping package mandating paid medical and family leave, eventually eliminating premium pay for Sunday workers, and instituting a yearly sales tax holiday.
Amanda Orlando, Diehl’s campaign manager, did not directly address a question Thursday on why Diehl filed the amendment. But she cast Healey’s criticism as an attempted distraction.
“It’s ridiculous and baseless for Maura Healey to accuse Geoff Diehl of wanting to do away with the minimum wage in Massachusetts, especially at a time when so many families are having a difficult time making ends meet due to the economic failures of the Biden economy,” Orlando said in an email.
States in recent years have regularly moved to hike, not cut, the minimum that people must be paid. At least 21 states began last year with higher minimum wages than the year before, and five others states raised theirs at some point later in 2021, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
By 2023, Washington will have the highest minimum wage for any state in the country, at $15.74 an hour. The District of Columbia has the highest minimum hourly wage at $16.10.
But others also aren’t far behind. In California, where currently any employer with 26 or more employees must pay at least $15 per hour and those with fewer must pay at least $14, the hourly floor will rise to $15.50 for everyone next year. Connecticut will also reach $15 per hour in June.
Twenty states effectively use the federal minimum, a group that includes Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee, where no minimum is required.
Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.