Minimum wage really is rising to $12.48 an hour next year, Michigan high court affirms

The Michigan Supreme Court has responded to a request from two state departments for clarity on how to implement minimum wage increases mandated by a ruling handed down last month .

It was, the court said, more or less what everyone thought.

According to the order, the state minimum wage will rise to $12.48 an hour on Feb. 21, 2025, to $13.29 in 2026, $14.16 in 2027 and $14.97 in 2028. Thereafter, the minimum wage would rise with inflation.

Those increases will take place Feb. 21 of each year, the ruling explained in answer to one of the questions put to the court.

The order released this afternoon also corrected a footnote to make clear that the state's tipped wage will rise significantly over the next several years and merge with the standard minimum wage in 2030.

"This footnote correction changes nothing of substance in the opinion," Justice Elizabeth Welch, the author of the original ruling, said in a concurrence. "And defendants properly understood the calculation required to determine the minimum wage rates."

She also used the opportunity to scold Justice Brian Zahra, who had laid out his disagreements with the original ruling in a dissent to today's order, that "the time to relitigate the opinion's merits has passed."

The state departments of Treasury and Labor and Economic Opportunity, which requested the clarification, said it was "essential in order for the State to faithfully implement this Court's dictates and avoid unnecessary litigation."

Last month, the court reinstated two ballot initiatives related to the state's minimum wage and to paid sick leave that had been adopted by a Republican majority in the state legislature in 2018 and subsequently watered down in a lame duck session.

The majority opinion said that "adopt and amend" strategy had "violated the people's constitutionally guaranteed right to propose and enact laws through the initiative process."

But the delay between the adoption of the ballot initiatives and the court's decision presented difficulties, among them how to deal with the specific timelines that were part of the original legislation - the wage initiative, for instance, would have raised the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2022 - without placing an immediate and undue burden on businesses.

And so the court delayed implementation of the initiatives until Feb. 21 of next year and ordered that increases in the minimum wage will follow timeline similar to the one laid out in the original law with the amounts adjusted for inflation.

The ruling has already drawn significant opposition from the Small Business Association of Michigan, restaurant owners and Republicans in the state legislature, who are calling for legislative modifications to court's plan.

Earlier today, more than 100 restaurant servers and bartenders demonstrated on the Capitol lawn, urging lawmakers to preserve the tipped wage credit.

If the credit goes away, "I and other seasoned professionals in the hospitality industry will leave this industry or perhaps just leave the state of Michigan," Brandon Brooks, a server at Salt of the Earth in Fennville, told the crowd.