The minimum wage in San Francisco will increase to $9.79 an hour for San Francisco's lowest paid workers starting Jan. 1, 2011. Of course, that won't make any difference to the 40,000 residents who are still looking for work.

The increase  of 1.3 percent is a mere formality as part of the Minimum Wage Ordinance passed by the voters in November 2003, which calls for annual rate adjustments based on the previous year’s Consumer Price Index for urban wage earners in the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan area.

There was no increase in the San Francisco minimum wage in 2010.