Minimum wage in Puerto Rico

The minimum wage in Puerto Rico varies from $3.61 per hour to $5.15 per hour. For those employers who are covered by the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) must pay the Federal minimum wage of $5.15 per hour. Employers who are not covered by the FLSA are allowed to pay their workers at least seventy percent of the Federal minimum wage or the applicable mandatory decree rate as stated under Puerto Rican law. Also any hours worked over forty hours in a week is paid at double the rate.

In June of 2006 the House of Representatives in Puerto Rico attempted to pass H.B. 1714 that would increase the minimum wage rate for workers throughout Puerto Rico. This bill designated the basic hourly state minimum wage to be $5.40 per hour as of July 1, 2006. This proposed bill also would increase the minimum wage by twenty cents annually every July 1^st until the year 2020 at which time it would increase to twenty-five cents thereafter. Passage of this bill is still pending.

Most of the employment in Puerto Rico can be broken down into several different occupational categories. For example, the largest employment (42.1%) is in manufacturing with 9.9% in the services industry, 9.6% or 250,000 employees are government workers and only 0.3% in agriculture. As a result any increase in the minimum wage would help the economy of Puerto Rico by redistributing the wealth to the less advantaged classes, subsidize agricultural jobs and move those workers from the poverty level.

The H.B. 1714 provided an exclusion clause that stated that those jobs such as agricultural workers and those workers in a particular industries or businesses or municipal governments where the State minimum wage would substantially affect their jobs the increase in the minimum wage would not apply. Even though Puerto Rico is not a state of the U.S. many goods and services are directly affected by their participation with the U.S. economy.