The 136-Hour Week
The 136-Hour Week
Utah has the lowest wage floor the law allows, one of the lowest union rates in the country, and a cost of living that no longer matches either. Twelve things I will work on in the Legislature, in the order I believe they can pass.
Hours a week a Utah minimum-wage worker would have to work to cover a single adult’s basic budget in Salt Lake County. A week contains 168 hours.
MIT’s Living Wage Calculator puts a single adult’s pre-tax cost of living in Salt Lake County at $51,472 a year as of February 2026. At Utah’s minimum wage of $7.25, that is 7,100 hours of work: 136.5 hours a week, every week, with no vacation.
The problem, in numbers that hold up
The wage argument gets lost when it turns into a values argument. It holds when it stays arithmetic. Here is the arithmetic.
Utah’s wage floor has not moved since July 2009. Seventeen years. Adjusted for inflation, the $7.25 set then is worth $4.68 today. To hold the same purchasing power it had the day it took effect, Utah’s minimum wage would need to be $11.24. Utah is one of 20 states still sitting at the federal floor. Thirty states and D.C. are above it, and 13 index automatically to inflation. Colorado is at $15.16. Arizona is at $15.15. Montana is at $10.85.
Real wages in Utah went backwards this year. The average Utah worker earned $1,195 a week in July 2026, which is 2.4 percent less than a year earlier once inflation is accounted for. Utah ranks 23rd among states for average wage, and 29th once you adjust for what things cost here. Leisure and hospitality, the state’s largest low-wage sector, averages $518 a week.
| Household | Living wage | Annual cost | Gap vs. $7.25 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 adult, no children | $24.75 | $51,472 | $17.50/hr |
| 1 adult, 1 child | $41.73 | $86,802 | $34.48/hr |
| 2 adults (1 working), 2 children | $43.68 | $90,862 | $36.43/hr |
| 2 adults (both working), 2 children | $28.62 ea. | $119,044 | $21.37/hr |
The gap is not only a floor problem. Utah’s median hourly wage was $22.60 in the last full occupational survey, below what MIT says a single adult with no children needs in Salt Lake County. The median Utah worker is not a minimum-wage worker, and is still short.
The costs that eat the paycheck. Infant and toddler care for two children runs roughly $24,000 a year in Utah, about $5,400 more than the average one-bedroom rent in Salt Lake City. The median Utah renter household now spends 30.1 percent of income on rent, the federal threshold for being cost burdened. Twenty-seven percent of Utahns aged 18 to 34 live with their parents.
Very few Utahns literally earn $7.25 an hour. Utah’s unemployment rate was 3.3 percent in 2025, and a tight labor market has done most of the work a wage floor would do at the very bottom. I would rather say that myself than have it said back to me.
The floor still matters for three reasons: it anchors the tipped wage at $2.13, it sets the reference point every low-wage employer bargains from, and it is the only wage number in Utah law. But the wage problem in Utah is mostly a middle problem, a median of $22.60 against a cost of $24.75, and the twelve below are weighted accordingly.
Why the obvious answers keep failing
Four Utah laws box in almost every wage idea. Knowing them is the difference between a proposal and a press release.
Utah Code 34-40-106 bars any city, town, or county from setting a minimum wage above the federal one. It goes further: a local government may not require its own contractors to pay above $7.25, and may not give any preference in bidding to an employer that pays more. Salt Lake City could not raise its own wage floor if every member of its council voted for it.
Utah’s Right to Work Law (Title 34, Chapter 34) makes union security agreements a class B misdemeanor, with each day a separate offense. Utah’s union membership rate in 2025 was 3.8 percent, 61,000 of 1.6 million workers, against 10.0 percent nationally. In 1989 it was 10.9 percent.
The 45-day session means a bill without a committee slot by mid-February is dead regardless of merit.
The 2026 session already ran this experiment. Three wage bills were filed. All three died.
That last line is the important one. In December 2025, in a special session, this Legislature voted 60 to 9 and 26 to 1 to repeal its own public-sector collective bargaining ban, with 48 House Republicans voting yes, rather than let it go to the voters. Labor groups had gathered more than 320,000 signatures. Of those, 251,274 were verified against a 140,748 requirement, clearing the threshold in all 15 required senate districts.
Utah’s supermajority did not repeal HB 267 because it changed its mind about unions. It repealed HB 267 because it counted signatures. That is the fact underneath everything below. In Utah, wage policy moves when it is popular, sourced, and argued as accountability. That is how I intend to argue it.
Twelve bills, ranked by what can actually pass
Each one carries a path marker, because you are entitled to know which of these I can realistically deliver and which I cannot. Bipartisan opening means a Republican has already sponsored it, or a Republican constituency already wants it. Needs a sponsor means the policy is defensible on Utah terms and has no champion yet, so I would carry it myself. Long game means it does not pass this decade without a ballot measure or a changed chamber. I will keep making those arguments. I will not promise you those outcomes.
Tier one: winnable inside this Legislature
Bring back the Construction Wage Standard Act
Require that public construction projects pay the wage already standard in that county, as measured by federal wage surveys. Clancy’s HB 245 failed 25 to 46 in February. It failed by 11 votes, not by 40.
- What it does
- Stops the state from using taxpayer money to bid local wages down. It touches only public projects, so it never reaches a private employer’s payroll.
- The evidence
- Polling Clancy cited showed more than 70 percent of Utah voters support area wage standards on public construction, 78 percent prefer paying local workers fairly over hiring the lowest-cost crew, and 79 percent prefer higher quality over lower cost. Research he presented found projects with wage standards cost no more than those without.
- What it costs
- Contested. Assume zero to modest. The fiscal fight is the whole fight.
- The counterargument
- The Mackinac Center’s work on Michigan road construction found prevailing wage raises state spending. I expect that study by name, and I will not pretend it does not exist. My answer is to narrow the bill: apply it above a project-cost threshold, sunset it after five years, and require the Legislative Auditor to report actual cost changes before renewal.
Make Utah’s Earned Income Tax Credit refundable
Utah is one of only four states, with Missouri, Ohio, and South Carolina, whose state EITC is nonrefundable only. A nonrefundable credit is worth nothing to a worker whose income tax liability is already near zero, which describes exactly the workers it was written for.
- What it does
- Delivers a raise through the tax code to people who are already working, with no employer mandate and no effect on any business’s payroll. It is the version of a wage increase a fiscal conservative can vote for.
- The evidence
- Thirty-one states plus D.C. run an EITC. The federal credit has four decades of research behind it as a work incentive, and the refundable design is what makes it reach low earners at all.
- What it costs
- Real, and it is an income tax expenditure, which puts it inside the education earmark fight. Scale it deliberately. Even a partially refundable credit is a change in kind, not degree.
- The counterargument
- “It’s welfare.” It is not: you cannot claim it without earned income. That is the entire design.
Swap the food tax for the income-rate cut
Utah has cut its income tax rate six years running, from 5 percent to 4.45 percent, at a cumulative cost near $1.5 billion. The 2026 cut alone (SB 60) costs roughly $101 million a year. The state’s 1.75 percent share of the grocery tax raises about $200 million. These are the same order of magnitude, and they land on completely different people.
- What it does
- Answers the question directly: yes, the food tax can be removed, and the Legislature already passed the repeal. HB 54 (2023) eliminated the 1.75 percent state grocery tax but made it contingent on voters approving Amendment A. On October 9, 2024, the Third District Court voided Amendment A because the state failed to publish it in newspapers 60 days before the election as the constitution requires. The repeal never took effect through no fault of the policy. A clean, non-contingent repeal bill is a live option.
- The evidence
- PolicyEngine’s analysis of SB 60 found an average benefit of $130 per household, ranging from $5 in the bottom income decile to $583 in the top, with no measurable effect on poverty or deep poverty. Removing the 1.75 percent state grocery tax is worth roughly $225 a year to a family of four spending $13,000 on groceries, about 45 times what the bottom decile got from the rate cut.
- What it costs
- About $200 million from the state share. The 1.25 percent local portion stays with cities and counties and should not be touched, or you have handed local governments a cut they did not vote for.
- The counterargument
- The education earmark. Grocery tax revenue is sales tax and goes to the General Fund; income tax is constitutionally earmarked for education. So this is not a straight swap and cannot be framed as one. The honest framing is a priority argument: the state chose $101 million for a rate cut that gave the bottom tenth of households $5, over $200 million for a cut every family sees at the register.
Pay transparency in job postings
Require employers above a headcount threshold to publish a wage range in every job listing. It costs the state nothing, mandates no wage, and demonstrably raises pay.
- What it does
- Fixes an information asymmetry rather than setting a price. This is a market-efficiency argument, not a labor argument, and should be made that way.
- The evidence
- Economists David Arnold, Simon Quach, and Bledi Taska studied Colorado’s 2021 law for NBER. Worker pay rose 1.3 percent relative to other states, with no effect on the number of jobs posted and no effect on aggregate employment. The mechanism was competition: wages rose even at firms that had always posted ranges, and even for workers already on payroll.
- What it costs
- Effectively nothing. Enforcement runs through existing labor administration.
- The counterargument
- Compliance burden on small employers. I would answer that in the drafting. Blouin’s version set the threshold at 15 employees. At 50, the objection largely disappears.
Give Utah’s wage theft law teeth
A wage a worker earned and never received is the cheapest raise in public policy: the money already exists and was already budgeted. Utah’s recovery system is built to fail at exactly the scale where theft happens.
- What it does
- Utah’s Labor Commission will only take wage claims between $50 and $10,000. It cannot handle overtime claims at all, since those go to the U.S. Department of Labor. It cannot help public employees. Everything outside that window goes to district court, which for a $12,000 claim means hiring a lawyer to chase your own paycheck.
- The evidence
- Minnesota and Colorado both made serious wage theft a felony in 2019 and paired it with liens and real recovery authority. The model is proven and it is not exotic.
- What it costs
- Modest administrative funding. Some states recover more than the enforcement costs.
- The counterargument
- Criminalizing payroll mistakes. I would draft around that with an intent standard, a cure period, and penalties scaled to the amount withheld and to repeat offenses.
Tier two: structural, and the fight is worth having
Condition the incentives on the wage, and mean it
The instinct here is right, and it is stronger than it looks, because Utah already agrees with it in writing. The Economic Development Tax Increment Financing program already requires participating companies to pay at least 110 percent of the county average wage. The problem is not that Utah lacks a wage condition. The problem is what happens when a company stops meeting it.
- What it does
- Four amendments, each defensible on its own. First, benchmark the wage requirement to a published cost-of-living standard for that county, not just the county average, which drifts downward in low-wage counties. Second, mandatory proportional clawbacks: miss job or wage targets by 20 percent, repay 20 percent, with no agency discretion to waive. Third, independent verification of company-reported employment and wages against state unemployment insurance records. Fourth, annual public disclosure by company name of commitments made, met, and missed.
- The evidence
- Good Jobs First’s clawback standards are exactly these four: proportional penalties, mandatory language without discretionary exceptions, independent verification against UI records, and public disclosure of non-compliant companies. Vermont, North Carolina, and Nevada score highest on their index. Utah’s post-performance structure is already a good bone to build on, since credits are paid after performance, up to 30 percent of new state tax revenue, or up to 50 cents on the dollar for rural data centers.
- Why now
- Tyson Foods is closing its Eagle Mountain plant, 723 jobs, five years after a $286 million private investment. Meanwhile Eagle Mountain residents faced a proposed 183 percent property tax increase while data centers received incentives. That contrast is the argument, and it is happening in real time.
- On exempting small business
- Exempting small business has direct precedent. California’s AB 1228 applied its $20 fast-food wage only to chains above a national location count, and the Berkeley study found no employment loss. A firm-size threshold is ordinary drafting in laws like this one.
- The counterargument
- “You’ll drive employers to Idaho.” The reply is that a company that will not commit to 110 percent of the county average wage is not the company the incentive was written to attract, and Utah is already paying only after performance. This is enforcement of an existing deal, not a new tax.
Let counties decide: the Colorado model
Repeal or narrow 34-40-106 so local governments can set a wage above the federal floor, with state guardrails. This is the local-control argument, and I intend to make it.
- What it does
- Recognizes that $7.25 means something different in Summit County than in Emery County, and that the people who know the difference are the ones who live there. Utah’s current law does the opposite of local control: it forbids a city from paying its own contractors more, and forbids it from preferring a bidder who pays well.
- The evidence
- Colorado repealed its preemption in 2019 with guardrails that answer nearly every objection: increases capped at the greater of 15 percent or $1.75 per year, effective only on January 1, tip offset preserved, and legislative reauthorization required once 10 percent of localities have adopted one. Six years on, four jurisdictions have used it: Denver at $18.81 in 2025, Boulder, Edgewater, and unincorporated Boulder County. Not a stampede. A controlled experiment.
- What it costs
- Nothing to the state.
- The counterargument
- A patchwork burdening multi-county employers. The Colorado guardrails were designed for exactly that: uniform effective dates, capped annual movement, preserved tip credit. I would cite those caps before the objection is raised.
A minimum wage indexed to Utah’s own median, phased
An incremental increase is the right instinct. The stronger version is to also make it self-adjusting, so Utah is not relitigating this every four years while the number quietly erodes.
- What it does
- Sets the floor at roughly half the local median wage, phases it in over several years, then indexes it to inflation. Utah’s median hourly wage was $22.60 in the last full survey, which puts the benchmark near $11 to $12, almost exactly the $11.24 that would restore 2009’s purchasing power. That is a defensible, arithmetic number rather than a slogan number.
- The evidence
- Arindrajit Dube’s framework for the Hamilton Project recommends precisely this: half the local-area median wage, extended phase-ins where the jump exceeds 50 percent, and automatic indexing to regional CPI so the wage does not erode between fights. Thirteen states already index.
- Where the research stands
- This is the most contested claim on this page, and I want to handle it carefully. On California’s $20 fast-food wage, Berkeley’s IRLE found wages up 8 to 9 percent, no negative employment effect, and prices up 1.5 percent, about six cents on a four-dollar burger. Dube’s May 2026 NBER paper on the same policy found wages up about 7 percent and employment elasticities ranging from minus 0.29 to plus 0.26 depending on method, genuinely uncertain and straddling zero. His clearest finding was a sharp drop in worker separations: people quit far less at higher wages, which is a direct cost saving to employers. I will present both. I am not going to quote only the one that helps me. The median estimate across 27 prior state minimum-wage events was an elasticity of minus 0.02, which is close to nothing, and that is the strongest honest version of the case.
- The counterargument
- NFIB opposed SB 179 on the grounds that it would “kill off job opportunities for teens and young adults.” That objection is aimed at a flat $20 with no phase-in and no indexing, which is what SB 179 actually was. A phased, median-indexed bill is a different object, and I would not defend it as though it were the same one.
Raise the tipped wage off $2.13
The tipped minimum is where Utah’s wage floor still literally binds. It has not moved since 1991.
- What it does
- Raises the cash wage an employer must pay before tips. Employers already owe the difference if tips fall short, but that guarantee is enforced by the same wage-claim system described in option 5, which caps at $10,000 and cannot touch overtime.
- What it costs
- Nothing to the state, and a real cost to restaurants, which will be the loudest voice in the room.
- The counterargument
- Servers themselves are frequently split on this, and in several states have organized against elimination of the tip credit. I do not claim to speak for them. A gradual increase in the cash floor is a far easier sell than “one fair wage.”
Repeal right to work
The largest single lever in this paper, and the least likely to move. It belongs on the list because it is true, not because it is winnable in 2027.
- The evidence
- EPI’s September 2026 analysis found workers in right-to-work states earn 6.7 percent less than workers in other states, more than $4,000 a year for a median full-time worker, after controlling for age, education, occupation, industry, sector, state unemployment, and regional price differences. That penalty has more than doubled since their 2015 estimate of 3.2 percent. It is worse for young workers, at minus 8.4 percent, than for anyone but Black and Hispanic workers. Union density averages 6.2 percent in right-to-work states against 16.0 percent elsewhere. Nationally in 2025, union members’ median weekly earnings were $1,404 against $1,174 for nonunion workers.
- Precedent
- Michigan repealed its right-to-work law effective February 2024 and restored prevailing wage. It is the only state to have done so in decades, and it is the case study to cite.
- The realistic version
- Full repeal is a long game. The near-term work is protecting what was just won. HB 267 was repealed by HB 2001 in December 2025, restoring public-sector bargaining. That repeal happened under referendum pressure and can be reversed the moment the pressure is off. A bill making public-sector bargaining rights harder to strip, or a constitutional amendment putting them beyond a single session, is a live and defensible fight right now.
- The counterargument
- NFIB’s position is that right to work “has helped make Utah the envy of other states in the job opportunities it offers.” Utah’s 3.3 percent unemployment rate makes that a serious argument, not a talking point. The honest reply is about wage levels, not job counts: Utah has the jobs and ranks 29th in cost-adjusted pay.
Tier three: the other half of the equation
A raise you hand straight to a daycare is not a raise. Two of the largest costs facing a Utah worker under 35 are child care and the price of entering a skilled trade, and both are addressable without touching a single employer’s wage bill.
Treat child care as wage policy
Two children in care costs a Utah family roughly $24,000 a year, more than the average Salt Lake City one-bedroom by about $5,400. For a household earning the state median of $104,000, that is a fifth of gross income before a single other bill.
- What it does
- The 2026 session already moved here, just barely. HB 190 expanded the employer-provided child care credit at a cost of $2.6 million, and HB 290 expanded the child tax credit at $7.1 million, averaging $388 for about 18,300 parents. Set those against $101 million for the income-rate cut and the priority ordering makes itself.
- Where to push
- Supply, not just credits. Utah’s constraint is the number of licensed slots, particularly for infants. Facility grants, zoning fixes for in-home providers, and wage supplements for child care workers, who are themselves among the state’s lowest-paid workers, do more than a credit against a bill that has to be paid first.
- The counterargument
- Cost, and a values objection about subsidizing non-parental care. The framing that survives both: this is a workforce participation measure, and it is what lets a second parent take a job at all.
Build the on-ramp for workers under 35
The generation in question does not need a lecture about learning a trade. It needs the trade to pay enough to start, and the benefits to follow them between jobs.
- The problem
- Twenty-seven percent of Utahns aged 18 to 34 live with their parents. Nationally, first-time buyers were just 21 percent of home sales in the year to mid-2025, the lowest share since 1981, and the median first-time buyer hit age 40, a record. Right-to-work’s wage penalty is 8.4 percent for workers aged 16 to 24, worse than for workers overall. Every structural feature of Utah’s wage law lands hardest on the youngest workers in it.
- Apprenticeship
- Utah runs registered apprenticeship through Apprenticeship Utah, and my529 funds can already be used for registered programs. The gaps are scale and the first-year wage. Fund employer-side subsidies for the first year of an apprenticeship and Utah gets trained journeymen instead of an eight-year labor shortage, which is the same shortage the construction industry is complaining about while opposing option 1.
- Portable benefits
- Utah has already legislated here, and it was a Republican initiative. The state’s portable benefits law let Stride launch the country’s first rideshare portable benefits contributions program with Lyft in Utah. That is a genuine bipartisan opening. Extend it beyond rideshare to the broader independent workforce, and the state gets credit for a first it already earned.
- The counterargument
- Portable benefits can be a vehicle for locking in independent contractor classification. Draft it so participation does not waive employee status, or the policy becomes the thing it was meant to fix.
Where I will start
Twelve is a list. What follows is the shorter set I will put my name on first, chosen from what has already passed, what nearly passed, and what the record will support under questioning.
- The food tax comes first. It is the only item on this list where the Legislature already passed the policy, a court voided the mechanism, and nobody has to be persuaded of the principle. Everyone experiences it weekly, and the contrast is two numbers: $5 a year for the bottom tenth of households from the income tax cut, against roughly $225 a year at the register for a family of four. I will carry or co-sponsor a clean repeal, with no constitutional hostage attached.
- I will carry Clancy’s construction wage bill. A Republican wrote it, it polls above 70 percent, and it lost by 11 votes. I would rather help pass a Republican’s good bill than lose by myself with my own.
- Pay transparency and a refundable EITC are the quiet workhorses. Neither one mandates a wage. Both raise pay. Both are defensible in fiscal-conservative language, and pay transparency has a clean NBER result behind it with no employment cost. I will file or co-sponsor both.
- I will make incentive accountability a standing question. Utah already requires 110 percent of the county average wage in its flagship incentive program. I intend to ask, on the record and in writing, how many companies have missed that target and what happened to them. If the answer is that nobody tracks it, Utahns are entitled to know that.
- On the minimum wage, I will keep it arithmetic. I am not going to campaign on “$15” or “$20.” The floor has not moved since 2009, it is worth $4.68 in the dollars it was written in, and restoring 2009’s purchasing power means $11.24. Phase it, index it, and nobody has to have this fight again in four years.
Utah did not repeal its public-sector bargaining ban because the Legislature had a change of heart. It repealed the ban 60 to 9 in a special session because 251,274 verified signatures were about to put it on a ballot. Wage policy in this state moves on arithmetic and on pressure.
Which is why my case comes down to this: we are not asking for a favor. We are asking the state to enforce the deals it already wrote, honor the repeal it already passed, and stop taxing groceries to fund a rate cut that gave a working family five dollars.
Sources
- MIT Living Wage Calculator, Salt Lake County, Utah. livingwage.mit.edu/counties/49035 (data current as of Feb. 15, 2026)
- MIT Living Wage Calculator, State of Utah. livingwage.mit.edu/states/49
- BLS Consumer Price Index (CPI-U, NSA): July 2026 = 333.918; July 2009 = 215.351. FRED CPIAUCNS; BLS CPI release, Aug. 2009
- Ballotpedia, Minimum wage increases in 2026. ballotpedia.org
- NELP, Raises from Coast to Coast in 2026. nelp.org
- USAFacts, average wage in Utah (BLS QCEW, July 2026). usafacts.org
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Utah, May 2023. bls.gov/oes
- BLS, Union Members 2025, Table 5 (state data). bls.gov
- BLS Mountain-Plains, Union Membership in Utah. bls.gov
- Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, 2026 Economic Report to the Governor, highlights. gardner.utah.edu
- U.S. Census via FRED, Median Household Income in Utah. fred.stlouisfed.org
- USAFacts, household rent spending in Utah (ACS 2024). usafacts.org
- Axios Salt Lake City, Utah day care costs (Child Care Aware data), May 29, 2025. axios.com
- Lehi Free Press, “American dream of homeownership on hold for most young Utahns,” July 29, 2026. lehifreepress.com
- Utah Code 34-40-106, Limitations on minimum wage imposed by cities, towns, or counties. le.utah.gov
- Utah Code Title 34, Chapter 34, Utah Right to Work Law. le.utah.gov
- H.B. 245 (2026), Construction Wage Standard Act, status and roll call. legiscan.com
- KSL, “Rep. Tyler Clancy eyes area standard wage policies for public construction projects.” ksl.com
- S.B. 178 (2026), Right to Work Amendments. legiscan.com
- S.B. 179 (2026), Wage Amendments. Bill text; status
- NFIB Utah, action alert opposing S.B. 178 and S.B. 179. nfib.com
- Ballotpedia News, “Utah State Legislature repeals public sector collective bargaining ban,” Dec. 11, 2025. news.ballotpedia.org
- Ballotpedia, Utah Prohibit Public Sector Union Collective Bargaining Referendum (2026), signature totals. ballotpedia.org
- Utah News Dispatch, “2026 Utah Legislature ends with feelings of one long Groundhog Day,” Mar. 7, 2026. utahnewsdispatch.com
- PolicyEngine, “Utah SB60: Proposed income tax rate reduction for 2026,” distributional analysis. policyengine.org
- Americans for Tax Reform, “Utah Enacts 6th Income Tax Cut In 6 Years.” atr.org
- Utah House of Representatives, “Utah’s Tax Cut Streak: Six Years and $1.5 Billion.” house.utleg.gov
- Utah State Tax Commission, Grocery Food Sales and Use Tax. tax.utah.gov
- Deseret News, “Does Utah still have a sales tax on food? It’s complicated,” Apr. 7, 2023. deseret.com
- Ballotpedia, Utah Amendment A (2024), court invalidation and the HB 54 contingency. ballotpedia.org
- ITEP, “State Earned Income Tax Credits Support Families and Workers in 2025.” itep.org
- Arnold, Quach and Taska (NBER), Colorado pay transparency, reported in Colorado Newsline, Nov. 21, 2025. coloradonewsline.com
- Utah Labor Commission, Wage Claim, $50 to $10,000 jurisdiction. laborcommission.utah.gov
- Akerman LLP, “Wage Theft Soon to be a Felony in Colorado and Minnesota.” akerman.com
- Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, EDTIF program, 110 percent of county average wage requirement. business.utah.gov
- Good Jobs First, Key Reforms: Clawbacks. goodjobsfirst.org
- Deseret News, “Utah data centers promise jobs and revenue, but opponents say benefits disappear,” Sept. 2, 2026. deseret.com
- Salt Lake Tribune, Eagle Mountain property tax increase and data center tax breaks, Aug. 22, 2026. sltrib.com
- Colorado Dept. of Labor and Employment, INFO #19: Local Minimum Wages. cdle.colorado.gov
- Dube, Designing Thoughtful Minimum Wage Policy at the State and Local Levels, The Hamilton Project. brookings.edu
- UC Berkeley IRLE, “Effects of the $20 California fast food minimum wage.” irle.berkeley.edu; Dube, NBER Working Paper 35171, May 2026. nber.org
- EPI, “Wages are lower in right-to-work states,” Sept. 1, 2026. epi.org; Utah Senate, on the state’s portable benefits law and the Stride-Lyft program. senate.utah.gov
