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Raising the Minimum Wage Catching Fire in the States |
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It’s been 10 years since Congress last voted to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $5.15 an hour. So, when it comes to Congress acting again to restore some buying power to the minimum wage, most of us have taken the advice songwriter Adrian Belew gave his daughter in the song “Oh Daddy”: “Don’t hold your breath, ‘cause it will only make you blue.”
But not union and community activists. We have taken a deep breath and gone to work to win minimum wage increases on the state level, fueling the momentum behind ballot initiatives in half-a-dozen states this fall—Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and Ohio. According to several new reports, these actions are paying off—looks like the public agrees with the AFL-CIO union movement that America Needs a Raise.
In fact, a new poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press finds 88 percent of the public says it’s time to raise the minimum wage. Get this: that includes 72 percent of Republicans asked!
A recent poll conducted by the Rocky Mountain News found 72 percent of likely voters say they “definitely” or “probably” will support that state’s ballot measure to raise the minimum wage, from $5.15 an hour to $6.85. The “definitely” camp accounts for 52 percent of the voters queried.
Other poll results are just as encouraging.
- A Northern Arizona University survey finds an 81 percent approval rating for Arizona’s bid to raise the minimum wage to $6.75 an hour.
- A St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll says 68 percent of Missouri voters back the bid in the Show-Me State to increase the minimum wage to $6.50 an hour.
- In Nevada, 77 percent of the state’s voters—including 64 percent of Republicans—support the initiative there to boost the minimum wage to $6.15 an hour, according to a survey by the Reno Gazette-Journal.
At stateline.org (a website covering state legislative and policy issues), reporter Christine Vestal has an in-depth look at the ballot initiatives and other actions to boost the minimum wage, which she says continue “an unprecedented two-year trend of state action on an issue that remains bottled up in Congress.” She writes:
Already this year, lawmakers in 11 states—Arkansas, California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and West Virginia—have enacted new statutes boosting their minimum-wage rates. Of that number, six for the first time increased wages above the federal rate, bringing to 23 the number of states whose lowest-paid workers will make more than the federal minimum.
The number of wage initiatives on the ballot this year surpasses the high-water mark in 1996, when four states voted on wage proposals.
She also notes 30 minimum wage bills were introduced in state legislatures this year and:
Republican legislators in Michigan and Arkansas were so worried that minimum-wage ballot measures would drive more Democratic voters to the polls that they preemptively joined Democrats in raising the rate through legislative action….But three other Republican governors—Robert Ehrlich of Maryland, Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts—vetoed wage hikes. Ehrlich’s and Romney’s vetoes were overturned, and Carcieri ultimately signed a second wage bill under pressure of a legislative override.
Get more info from the AFL-CIO and ACORN, which are partnering to raise the minimum wage, by going to the AFL-CIO America Needs a Raise website and ACORN’s Taking It to the States site.
Click here to send a message to your U.S. House of Representatives member that it’s time for Congress to pass a real minimum wage increase—with no strings attached.
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