President Obama’s efforts to raise the minimum wage have been blocked at the federal level, but measures on state and local ballots next month will help advance his goal.
Five states and two major cities will have minimum wage increases on the ballot on Nov. 4, adding to the 10 states and several big cities that already have raised the wage floor this year.
“We’ve seen this year a real uptick in how much is done at the local level,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at University of California Berkeley, noting that Obama in his State of the Union address in January called on mayors and governors to raise state and local minimum wages.
By promoting state and local efforts, the Obama administration is circumventing opposition from congressional Republicans to raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10. It also achieves part of the policy agenda that it has said is key to addressing the fortunes of middle-class Americans and builds momentum on a political issue that is always popular in polls.
Labor Secretary Tom Perez said on a conference call Friday that “President Obama has explicitly instructed us, and we’re doing that, to make sure we do everything in our power to help our state and local partners to enact minimum wage laws.”
In addition to implementing an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, Perez said he has been trying to promote other minimum wage increases by traveling the country talking to low-wage workers. “The good news is [that] state and local leaders are taking up the mantle and leading on this,” he said. “They’re not waiting for leadership from Washington, they’re taking matters into their own hands.”
Some states have done that through legislation, including, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and West Virginia. As a result, 23 states now require hourly wages higher than the federal government’s minimum.
Cities such as the District of Columbia and Seattle also have implemented their own wage increases.
Four states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — have certified ballot measures for November that would amend state statutes to increase the minimum wage. Illinois’ ballot will include an advisory question asking voters if they support raising the minimum wage to $10.
November’s election will see ballot measures in San Francisco and Oakland proposing to raise the minimum wage to $15 and $12.25, respectively, according to the National Employment Law Project. There are also active campaigns in five more cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Louisville, Ky., and Portland, Maine.
In addition to better matching wages to local costs of living, the ballot measures will help the politics of the minimum wage at the federal level, Jacobs said. “As this develops at the state level, it helps move the politics to do it at the federal level as well,” he said. He explained that “it’s about the infrastructure in the sense of the organization, the coalitions, the relationships and developing understanding of the issues.”
Obama noted the success of states and cities in raising mandatory wages in his Labor Day address, saying, “In the year and a half since I first asked Congress to raise the minimum wage, Americans of all walks of life are doing just that.”
He also said that “until we’ve got a Congress that cares about raising working folks’ wages, it’s up to the rest of us to make it happen.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to wait for a new Congress. On Friday, the San Franciscan called on House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to call lawmakers back to Washington to work on minimum wage legislation before the election.
But for the time being, Democrats are going to settle for the ballot measures.
