Red States workers’ pay cut

By Negin Owliaei

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Last month, the House voted to incrementally raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

If the Senate passes the bill, it would be the first federal minimum-wage increase in more than a decade – far too long for residents of the 21 states that don’t have their own higher minimum wage.

Here’s another sad truth: Plenty of cities in those states have tried to raise their minimum wage, only to be stymied by state lawmakers. That’s thanks to state pre-emption laws that keep localities from adopting all kinds of policies, from paid sick leave to local fracking bans to wage increases.

Pre-emption laws have exploded in recent years as predominantly Republican state legislatures, bolstered by right-wing corporate groups, look to curb anything progressive from city governments.

One particularly notorious example took place in St. Louis, which, after years of organizing, passed an ordinance in 2015 to gradually raise the city’s minimum wage to a modest $11 an hour. Business interests spent months tying the wage increase up in courts, but workers finally won.

But just weeks after the first wage raise went into effect in 2017, Missouri’s Republican legislature passed a pre-emption law that nullified any minimum wage above that in state laws.

Workers in St. Louis saw their pay cut almost immediately.

A ballot initiative to raise Missouri’s statewide minimum wage overwhelmingly passed in 2018, finally winning workers a raise. But the troubling pre-emption law is still on the books.

Missourians aren’t the only ones whose lawmakers are trying to deny them a raise. A new report from the National Employment Law Project found that 25 states specifically pre-empt local minimum wages.

Nearly 346,000 workers have been affected by preempted minimum wages in 12 cities and counties. Those workers are losing $4,100 each on average – nearly $1.5 billion a year in total.

More than half of the workers affected by preemption in those localities are women. And in Birmingham, Miami Beach, and St. Louis, which were all preempted, workers of color are the overwhelming majority.

Most of these localities also have poverty rates far higher than the U.S. average.

States aren’t solely focused on slapping down minimum-wage raises, a new report from the Local Solutions Support Center and the State Innovation Exchange finds. Thanks to corporate lobbying, 23 states have blocked local paid sick leave laws, 44 states block local regulations for Lyft and Uber, and 31 states don’t allow local rent control.

State legislatures skew strongly white and male, and have a track record of pre-empting policies designed to remove structural barriers for marginalized communities.

In Louisiana, a coalition of labor, faith, and community groups is pushing to restore local control over wage and paid leave policies. And cross-issue coalitions in Florida and Texas have beaten back pre- emptive legislation before it even becomes law.

Freeing localities from this stranglehold of corporate power will help local communities figure out what’s best for themselves.

Negin Owliaei is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies.