Minnesota Governor Rejects GOP-Backed Wage Suppression
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) this week vetoed a bill written to deny workers paid sick-time and quash a local campaign to lift the minimum wage to $15 per hour.
The state’s base wage is $9.50 per hour, or $19,760 annually, Dayton noted in his veto message. It’s an amount that places a family of four below the poverty line.
“People need to be making a livable wage, which is $15 per hour,” Kyanna Roland, an activist with TakeAction Minnesota, which supports the $15 minimum wage, told Rewire.
The GOP legislation, SF 3, is an example of a preemption bill, an increasingly popular big-business strategy to suppress local labor laws. In 2016, 36 states introduced bills to preempt city ordinances, up from 29 states just a year earlier.
Minnesota Republicans advanced the preemption legislation in response to an anticipated $15 minimum wage hike in Minneapolis and paid sick-time measures passed in that city and St. Paul.
Without paid sick leave, employees “didn’t got to the doctor, they went to work sick,” Roland told Rewire. “That was a huge issue, especially in the food industry, where people would go to work sick.”
In recent years, roughly 40 U.S. cities have increased their minimum wage, and more than 30 have guaranteed paid sick days, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP). The National League of Cities called 2016 the year of the minimum wage increase. Read the full story here.
