Which state has the top minimum wage? A ranking from lowest to highest.

29 states (and one important city) have an hourly minimum wage above the $7.25 an hour federal rate. Can you guess where the highest minimum wage in the country is? 

4. Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont: $9.60

Wilson Ring/AP/File
Trees on a Vermont mountainside display near-peak color in Waterbury Center, Vt. (Thursday Oct. 14, 2015).

Connecticut’s 2016 minimum-wage increase is part of a plan that began in 2014, when the minimum wage was $8.70 per hour, to gradually phase up the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2017. Vermont is projected to follow a similar plan, and will increase its state minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2017. In Rhode Island, certain domestic employees, like golf caddies or shoe shiners, are ineligible to receive the minimum wage.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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