Maine Minimum Wage Changes: The Bottom Line

April 8th, 2007 Posted by Mark

For Maine employers then, the new minimum wage is old news, as is the fact that they had to get a new Maine minimum wage poster. Of course, if you haven’t gotten your updated Maine minimum wage labor law poster, I would strongly recommend doing so now, before they catch you. Technically, when the new Maine minimum wage went into effect this past October, you should have had the poster on the wall.

This Maine minimum wage poster will still be good for this coming October, too, when the Maine minimum wage goes up again to $7 per hour. That is because the new Maine minimum wage poster—which I am looking at at this very moment—contains details about the two part minimum wage increase, with the two increases occurring in October of 2006 and 2007.

The Maine minimum wage poster also contains info on so called service employees, or tipped employees. The state considers any employee that makes more than $20 per month in tips a service, or tipped, employee. And as such, employers in the state of Maine, according to the Maine minimum wage law, can pay these workers half of the regular minimum wage, as long as the other half is made up for by the tips that they receive.

If the worker’s tips do not make up the difference in any given week, then you the employer must make up the difference. This system is quite similar to how tip credits work in the other states that we have looked at, though some states do have a system now were they set a definite wage rate for tipped employees (whereas Maine here has set a proportionate rate of 50 percent for the tip credit). The significance? When Maine’s minimum wage goes up in October again, the service employee minimum wage will go up too.

Last 10 posts by Mark

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Maine Minimum Wage Changes: The Bottom Line (Cont.) »
Posted in Employment Laws, Maine, Minimum Wage, Wage and Hour

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