By Carol Kuniholm
On Dec. 1, Pennsylvania’s legislature enjoyed its 30th annual automatic pay raise, bringing the base salary to $113,575 per year, the 3rd highest in the nation and more than double the average salary for U.S. state legislators.
Meanwhile, PA’s minimum wage workers remain stalled at $7.25 an hour, the wage put in place by Congress in 2009, a 10 cent raise from the most recent minimum wage legislation enacted in Pennsylvania in 2006.
PA’s mid-Atlantic neighbors have all raised minimum wage multiple times in the intervening years, with Maryland, New York, New Jersey and DC at $15 or more an hour. West Virginia, stuck at $8.60 from 2016 to 2025, will increase to $12.00 in 2016. Ohio will increase to $11.00.
Multiple minimum wage bills are introduced every legislative session, but none come to a final vote. A 2022 poll showed 73% of Pennsylvania voters supported a raise to the minimum wage. A 2024 poll put that number at 82%.
Yet a current bill, passed in the PA House in less than a week, has been sitting in the PA Senate since June.
Solutions that enjoy strong public support pass quickly in many other states. PA is one of a handful where important reforms languish and little gets done. In most recent sessions, less than 7% of introduced bills came to a final vote. 2025 may have set a new low, with just 54 bills enacted so far, compared to hundreds passed in neighboring part-time legislatures. Why?
Legislators past and present point to a tight knot of dysfunction that puts all the power in the hands of a few legislative leaders who answer to donors rather than voters. Since 1988, the wealthiest Pennsylvanians have gathered in Manhattan in December with politicians who aspire to PA leadership to set the groundwork for the year ahead. This year, they will gather at the Waldorf Astoria for the Pennsylvania Society annual weekend retreat.
This is a scene outside a reception held during a 2018 Pennsylvania Society weekend. The Pennsylvania Society’s annual meeting is being held this year at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
File/PennLive.com
That retreat is a reminder that for at least a century and a half, PA’s legislative agenda has been sold to the highest bidders, yielding policies that benefit the wealthiest few, rather than PA legislators’ own constituents.
While the agenda was once decided by railroad moguls and steel and timber barons, the primary donors are now billionaires and multinational corporations, all determined to see the commonwealth’s immense resources benefit their own profit rather than the common good. So why no action on minimum wage? Check PA think-tanks funded by the PA Chamber of Commerce, PA Manufacturing Association, and PA mega donors. They suggest a raise to PA’s minimum wage would destroy Pennsylvania’s economy, a claim belied by evidence in neighbor states and less donor-centric research.
Over a decade ago, I started a quest to understand why a state that once led the nation in educating children and providing a free library had more schools without libraries and greater school funding inequities than any other state in the nation. I’ve since learned much about the connections between PA’s leader-led redistricting, inability to pass gift bans or modest campaign finance reforms, and one of the most non-responsive, unaccountable legislative processes in the nation.
What I learned led me to help launch Fair Districts PA, a fiscal project of the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, now a grassroots movement of informed citizens determined to reclaim the representation promised in our founding documents. That group has since also launched a project called Fix Harrisburg, highlighting legislative dysfunction.
As we move toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and of Pennsylvania’s first state constitution, it’s time for us all to demand a return to government of, by and for the people, rather than of, by, and for political leaders and their ultra-wealthy cronies.
Find out more at FairDistrictsPA.com and FixHarrisburg.com.
Carol Kuniholm is chair of Fair Districts PA.