With the Supreme Court’s decision today not to hear the fast food industry’s lawsuit against Seattle, the Nation’s first $15 minimum wage law is safe and opponents of higher pay floors for U.S. workers are running low on options.
The decision upholds two previous rulings that Seattle’s law does not discriminate against franchise firms like McDonald’s. The case was the most prominent legal challenge to a large minimum wage hike in recent years, and one of several to fail.
But while the hugely profitable industries that oppose the "Fight for $15" workers and their allies aren’t making much progress on the legal front, they’re far from done fighting. The minimum wage battleground reaches far beyond the legal arguments that have failed in Seattle, New York, and Washington, D.C.
With defeat in court long expected, opponents have turned instead to a different strategy: Cutting off working people’s primary avenue to economic independence before they even get to walk down it. You might expect self-described free-market critics to be content to let cities and states flirt with wage hikes, knowing that if they go too far the market will correct. But instead, corporate interests and their conservative allies are setting out to deny local communities the chance to even experiment with higher pay floors. Lawmakers in dozens of states have sought to preempt local employment laws of all kinds, from minimum wages to paid sick leave laws to anti-discrimination protections in the workplace.
Preemption has started to draw more attention in the past year. For almost as long, states have been barring local communities from forcing corporate interests to shift money from shareholders to workers. Florida barred its towns and counties from hiking wages all the way back in 2003, a full decade before New York City fast food workers walked off the job and launched the "Fight for $15".
From 2011 to 2013, lawmakers in 31 states introduced 105 bills drafted by the corporate interests designed to chip away at wage standards at state and local levels.
But since low-wage workers’ protests erupted into a national campaign with a long and growing string of victories under its belt, the idea of circumventing local democracy with preemption measures has started to take off. The similar, parallel momentum behind state and local paid sick leave laws prompted a similar backlash.
Now, the state’s working class is fighting back in court. A lawsuit filed Thursday against Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (R) argues that keeping minimum wage levels down in the poverty zone in such a deeply black, deeply poor state violates the Constitution.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is currently touring California, weeks after that state adopted a $15 minimum wage plan. Scott hopes to lure California businesses to Florida. He insists 700,000 jobs will be lost in the coming years thanks to the hike Gov. Jerry Brown (D-CA) signed last month.
The estimate is bogus, according to UC Berkeley economist Michael Reich. But it’s a big, flashy number. And after minimum wages stagnated for decades around the country, it’s easy to throw out gaudy claims about job-killing. There just aren’t many case studies out there to tell us with confidence just who’s right and who’s wrong about the kinds of large-but-flexible wage hikes that Seattle, New York, California, and dozens of other governments have decided to enact.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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