Happy Labor Day
Missouri is book-ended on eat side by blue-ish cities: Kansas City on the West and St. Louis on the East. In between is a lot of red. Wages & labor, among many others, are areas where the differences clash. Though the GOP controls Jefferson City the people are fighting back.
From last month:
With the submission of more than 300,000 signatures Friday, Missouri’s right-to-work law won’t go into effect Aug. 28 and its fate likely will be put to voters in 2018.
The law is suspended, Secretary of State spokeswoman Maura Browning told St. Louis Public Radio. The office still needs to verify that at least 100,000 of the signatures are from registered voters — the minimum to force a statewide vote in November 2018. (St. Louis Public Radio)
If the signatures are conformed, this gives lots of time to mount a campaign to override the legislature on unions. St. Louis’ higher minimum wage has been rolled back by the state GOP, but again efforts are underway to change that as well:
In Missouri, advocates of a higher minimum wage are already mobilizing a new statewide campaign to get a minimum wage measure on the November 2018 ballot. If organizers with the “Raise Up Missouri” campaign gather enough signatures and voters approve it next year, Missouri’s minimum wage would go up to $8.60 in 2019 and increase 85 cents each year until 2023, when it would hit $12 an hour.
Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University who studies labor and inequality, points to the successful 2014 statewide measure raising Arkansas’ minimum wage as an example of the issue’s resonance beyond a liberal base. (Post-Dispatch)
Arkansas is just as backwards as Missouri, perhaps more. So if they can increase their statewide minimum wage we should too.
Have a great Labor Day today.
— Steve Patterson