Tracy duCharme, owner of Color Me Mine pottery studio in Colorado Springs and longtime advocate for raising the minimum wage, poses for a portrait in her studio on Monday, July 29, 2024. Photo by Parker Seibold / Special to The Colorado Trust
Tracy duCharme opened her paint-your-own-pottery store in Colorado Springs more than 14 years ago. Blank canvases—bowls, plates, mugs—lined the shelves. Bottles of paint were on display for customers who would pour, swirl and mix them to make their designs.
Colorado’s minimum wage was $7.24 per hour back then. In 2024, that pay rate has essentially doubled to $14.42. That means duCharme’s payroll expenses for her nine, primarily part-time employees have also risen; most are currently earning around $20 per hour, including tips.
DuCharme is fine with that. Early in her tenure as a business owner, she advocated for raising the minimum wage and received a lot of pushback from her professional community.
“Other business owners would criticize me: ‘If you want to pay your employees more, you’re free to do that. Why are you trying to force it on other people?’” she said. “It’s really hard to raise wages in isolation.”
Colorado has the ninth-highest minimum wage in the country (Washington, D.C., takes the top spot at $17 per hour). It’s also one of 34 states, districts and territories to exceed the federal minimum wage, which has remained stagnant at $7.25 per hour since 2009.
For duCharme, helping her employees afford housing and health care is critical to being a responsible business owner.
“I don’t want to have a situation where my employees are working to make my business a success but can’t survive on their income,” she said.
The ability to cover basic needs is one of the key arguments for raising the minimum wage. But have the changes in Colorado achieved that for workers?
Opponents of minimum-wage increases cite several reasons in their arguments, including that higher pay can lead to inflation and raise the cost of goods for consumers and that it can ultimately harm workers by forcing businesses to reduce hours, hire fewer people, lay people off or close altogether.
Many of those critiques have been disputed at a national level. Evidence from Denver, which has the highest minimum wage in the state at $18.29 per hour, also counters many of opponents’ claims.
While economists say it can be challenging to parse the precise impacts of minimum-wage increases from other policies, the 2023 Local Minimum Wage Report published by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE) shows that Denver’s minimum-wage increases lowered unemployment, raised earnings and benefitted the city’s economy.
For example, per capita sales tax at restaurants and bars grew by 85%, double that of Colorado and comparable cities and counties. (CDLE tried to isolate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the data throughout its analysis.)
“The opposite of what opponents of minimum wage said would happen, happened,” the Colorado Fiscal Institute concluded after reviewing the report. (The Colorado Fiscal Institute is a Colorado Trust grantee.)
These results have an impact beyond minimum-wage workers.
“When you raise the minimum wage, that means that workers who used to get what’s now the minimum wage, they need a raise too,” said Scott Moss, director of the CDLE Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. “It tends to up the pay scale.”
Moss said weekly earnings have risen by 18% on average in Colorado since 2019. They’ve grown the most in industries that employ the most low-wage workers, such as leisure and hospitality.
Contrary to concerns that employers might cut hours to even out their balance sheets or opt to close because they can’t absorb the increased costs, Moss said the data doesn’t support the notion that Denver is experiencing more business closures than anywhere else in the state.
There’s also a spillover effect across geographic boundaries. Take neighboring municipalities like Englewood and Denver: A sandwich shop with locations in both will likely have to raise pay to the higher minimum wage to fill their staff openings. Otherwise, smart employees will add a few minutes to their commute to earn a slightly higher salary.
Moss and his family live near the Denver-Aurora border. When his two teenage kids applied for summer jobs, they limited their search to Denver—they’ll earn nearly $4 more per hour there.
The overall economy aside, a higher minimum wage hasn’t necessarily made living in Colorado affordable.
Alek Wells worked at a pizza parlor in Boulder for three years. The minimum-wage job helped him cover expenses as he worked toward bachelor’s degrees in political science and international affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder. Since graduating in May, the 23-year-old continued to work at the restaurant while trying to find a more stable, career-focused job.
Though he was earning tips on top of his $14.42 hourly wage, Wells was finding it more challenging than ever to stay afloat.
“Every year, with the cost of living continuing to increase, the minimum wage has been insufficient and actually has made me slowly give up more and more,” he said. “To make my rent and everything affordable, I had to cut back on everything nonessential… I can’t save money because 80-90% of my income goes to rent, utilities, expenses and food. That difference, people my age, we feel that crucially.”
It started as a student when Wells quit club soccer so he could take on more shifts. More recently, he watched his grocery bills rise even as he limited himself primarily to milk, cereal, sandwich fixings and coffee. His phone screen has been cracked for a year. He lived with three roommates and sometimes worked additional part-time jobs to make ends meet.
Wells watched numerous friends move back home with their parents to save up. Now, he’s one of them.
When his lease ended in July, Wells and his roommates moved out and back to their respective hometowns. His Boulder-area job hunt had been unsuccessful—unpaid internships were a nonstarter. Not having a car or the ability to afford the associated insurance limited where and when he could work. So Wells decided to visit his family in Florida and remain there while he continued to look for a way to start his career path.
“To work at just part-time jobs, I can do that anywhere,” he said. “I had no real job prospects or opportunities working out in Colorado… . Without a serious connection or five years of work experience, it’s hard.”
Instead, Wells is saving money and working part-time on weekends while looking for opportunities in Washington, D.C., his goal location. And if he has to move there and work part-time as a server, he’ll do that. He’s finding that rent for apartments in the nation’s capital is similar to prices in Boulder.
“If I’m going to have a similar situation… I might as well be doing it in the place where I want to end up,” he said.
The Boulder County Self-Sufficiency Wage Coalition—which includes the cities of Boulder, Erie, Lafayette, Longmont and Louisville—is pushing to increase wages to a starting level of $15.69 per hour on Jan. 1, 2025. That would match unincorporated Boulder County, one of three Colorado areas that have exceeded the state minimum wage, including Denver and Edgewater (the latter coming in at $15.02 per hour).
Colorado has some of the most unaffordable housing prices and highest living costs in the country. As a result, low-wage workers like Wells continue to struggle to meet their basic needs or achieve what many would consider a baseline standard of living even with the pay increases.
“Livable doesn’t mean comfortable. It means survivable. And that’s not how it should be,” said Bill Tornquist, director of Mi Casa Resource Center’s Career Pathways program. “It should be that you have some extra funding to be able to provide a little bit of something—you don’t have to be rich, but, sure, buy your child a birthday gift, a Christmas gift or go out to dinner, so you’re not always having to get fast food.”
By nearly any metric, even Colorado and Denver’s elevated minimum wages are not livable.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s renowned living-wage calculator estimates that a person living in Colorado must make $51,644 per year to support themselves. One-quarter of minimum-wage workers are employed for less than 40 hours per week, though, so they often find themselves cobbling together multiple jobs to afford needs like health insurance or child care.
According to a 2024 National Low Income Housing Coalition report, a full-time worker must earn $37.47 per hour—or work 104 hours per week at the state’s current minimum wage—to afford a two-bedroom rental in Colorado.
In Denver, an adult with one preschool and one school-aged child would need to earn $40.46 per hour—more than twice the city’s current minimum wage—to meet the Colorado Center on Law and Policy’s self-sufficiency standard. (The Colorado Center on Law and Policy is a Colorado Trust grantee.)
Still, minimum-wage workers are seeing more money in their pockets. Colorado Fiscal Institute research shows an overall real-wage growth for the lowest-earning workers in the state of nearly 17% between 2018 and 2022. More people have grown out of the “low-wage” category (jobs that pay less than what someone working full-time would need to earn to support a family of four and stay above the federal poverty level). For example, in 2020, 72% of fast-food workers held low-wage jobs, which dropped to 60% in 2022; 54% of maids and house cleaners were in low-wage jobs in 2020, compared to 38% by 2022.
“We’re seeing real wage growth at the bottom because of the minimum wage,” said Chris Stiffler, a senior economist at the Colorado Fiscal Institute. “I’m confident to say that.”
Of course, economics is not the only necessary consideration when determining minimum-wage policies. Research has shown that increases in the minimum wage can also improve health outcomes for children of low-wage workers, reduce the number of deaths by suicide and help lower the racial wage gap.
Alek Wells is a proponent of Boulder County’s efforts to raise the lowest pay rates for all those reasons.
“That economic pressure—from either paying your rent or you can’t even go out—is causing young people a lot of mental, emotional and physical harm and causing a lot of other issues,” he said. “Before this can spiral and lead into bigger, broader issues… raising the minimum wage is a crucial step.”
Minimum-wage increases also aren’t felt equally by all workers. According to the Colorado Fiscal Institute, more than 60% of minimum-wage workers in Colorado are women, and the gender wage gap has only widened over the past three years.
Among the lowest earners in the country (the bottom 10th percentile, which can be more than the minimum wage), women earn $1.55 less per hour than men. Still, advocates say these rate increases are better than stagnation.
“There’s so much more to it in terms of what it means to the broader economy and in people’s lives,” said Louise Myrland, vice president of programs at the Women’s Foundation of Colorado. “If the minimum wage hadn’t been increasing alongside everything else that’s been changing in this economy, the challenges that have been so clear in so many ways would be even greater [in Colorado].”
“Women,” she added, “are the primary beneficiaries of those minimum-wage increases.”
A 2023 analysis by the Center for American Progress estimated that a $15 federal minimum wage would raise pay for nearly 40 million people, or 1 in 4 workers, while also helping to “reduce stubborn gender, racial, and ethnic wage gaps for women, Black and Latino workers.”
One problem contributing to this intractability is that workers who earn more lose access to government benefits, potentially leaving them worse off financially. This is commonly known as the “cliff effect.” Benefits thresholds are also federally determined and consistent across states rather than reflecting varied living costs.
As a result, “increasing the minimum wage doesn’t necessarily increase equity or even accessibility,” said Tamra Ryan, CEO of the Women’s Bean Project and a 2023 Coors Economic Mobility Fellow at the Common Sense Institute. In a 2023 report she co-authored, Ryan noted that “as a result of a $1 wage increase from $30 to $31, a single parent with one child will lose $6.25 in hourly benefits.”
Successful minimum-wage policies must be tied to more extensive social safety-net programs and supports, Ryan and Myrland say. Otherwise, they risk leaving people in a cycle of poverty rather than on a path to independence. In Colorado, efforts such as the brand-new Family and Medical Leave Insurance Program, universal preschool program and expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit aim to incentivize employment and help low-wage workers’ pay go further. Focusing on scheduling stability and fair work-week laws (ensuring adequate hours for workers) can also improve worker well-being while covering the needs of their employers.
“If your business cannot be profitable and simultaneously pay a living wage or a reasonable wage, then I don’t think that’s a successful business,” said duCharme, the Colorado Springs business owner.
“Raising the minimum wage is almost like giving a shot in the arm to your local community, in my view. My business is going to thrive when my community is economically healthy.”
