Minimum wage for Kansas City’s full-time municipal workers rising to $17.35
Full-time Kansas City employees will soon make a minimum of $17.35 an hour, under a new labor agreement union and city officials announced Tuesday.
The changes, which also include a new minimum wage of $16.12 for part-time employees, go into effect Aug. 1.
“We are Kansas City,” Local 500 president Reginald Silvers said during a Tuesday morning contract signing at City Hall. “It doesn’t move without us. … And this contract is a start in the right direction in retaining, recruitment and training.”
Mayor Quinton Lucas told the nearly 50 city workers gathered in the council chambers that he was proud to celebrate something he felt was overdue: “paying people their fair share.”
While all city employees are receiving at least a 6% raise, the average is 12.6%, said City Manager Brian Platt. The contract also includes annual pay increases of 3% to 4%, as well as longevity pay for employees who have worked for the city for five or more years.
Last year, the City Council sped along a minimum wage of $15 an hour for city employees. Missouri’s state minimum wage this year is $11.15 an hour, up from $10.30 last year. By 2023, it will hit $12.
“This aligns with the market,” Platt said after the signing. “We were way out of sync with everyone else. And we’ve been losing a lot of people to other municipalities, to the private sector and to a lot of other places. This keeps the great workers that we’ve got here.”
Plus, Platt said, the city workers deserve it.
The last contract was signed in 2018. This process, slowed down by the pandemic, took about a year and a half to finish.
“It’s a long time coming,” Silvers said after the signing. “That’s what matters most, that the employees are happy.”
This story was originally published May 10, 2022 at 3:37 PM.
