On November 8, 2022, voters in Nebraska approved a ballot measure to raise the statewide minimum amount wage to $15 an hour, up from $9. The evaluate, Initiative 433, will step by step maximize the state’s wage floor to $15 an hour by 2026. The improvements are intended to be manufactured every yr as follows:
- $10.50 on January 1, 2023
- $12.00 on January 1, 2024
- $13.50 on January 1, 2025 and
- $15.00 on January 1, 2026.
Just after 2026, the state’s least wage will see extra increases each yr centered on the boost in the price of living. Nebraska at this time has a $9 hourly minimum amount wage, the result of a 2014 ballot measure, Initiative 425, which elevated the state’s least wage up from $7.25.
Nebraska was one particular of four states/districts with minimum amount wage measures on the ballots this November, alongside with Nevada, the District of Columbia, and Maine. All the measures were approved, other than in Portland, Maine, where a proposal for an $18 minimal wage failed. The measure would have made that city the initially in the nation to approve these types of a higher floor. Initiative 433’s good results in Nebraska is probably to be seen as portion of a larger sized pattern that voters across bash lines help bare minimum wage will increase. Since 1938, when the Truthful Labor Benchmarks Act established a federal wage flooring, voters have turned down only 3 of the 30 proposed statewide minimal wage increases on ballots.
There are quite a few exemptions to protection underneath Nebraska and federal bare minimum wage legislation. For instance, Nebraska and federal legislation permit companies to spend tipped staff a lot less than the minimal wage, as lengthy as guidelines make up the variance. The existing minimal wage for tipped workforce is $2.13 an hour. The sum of the hourly wage and strategies obtained by personnel compensated in this way must equivalent or exceed the state’s new minimum wage laws. See NEB. REV. STAT. § 48-1203(3). What’s more, Nebraska regulation exempts businesses who employ fewer than 4 employees at any one time. See NEB. REV. STAT. § 48-1202(2). And there is no Nebraska minimum wage prerequisite for a worker employed in agriculture, as a babysitter in a non-public household, in a bona fide executive, administrative, or skilled capability or as a super intendent or supervisor, or by the United States, the state of Nebraska, or any political subdivision of either of them. Id. § 48-1202(3).
Even so, companies need to progress with warning right before assuming their workers are exempt from least wage coverage. Personnel protections are often construed pretty liberally, and exemptions are to be narrowly construed against the employer searching for to assert them. See Mays v. Midnite Desires, Inc., 300 Neb. 485, 915 N.W.2d 71 (2018) See also Sutton v. Engineered Devices, Inc., 598 F.2d 1134, 1135 n.3 (8th Cir. 1979).