San Francisco is likely to follow Seattle to a $15 minimum wage.
Low-wage workers in
four states and a pair of California cities are likely to get a raise as a result of Tuesday's elections, with ballot measures to raise the minimum wage drawing strong support. Significantly, they're also
not drawing a whole lot of organized opposition. Few of the business groups that would be lobbying fiercely to kill a proposal by the Arkansas or Alaska state legislatures to raise the minimum wage are doing much on these votes. There's a reason for that, as the chair of the Club for Growth, an Arkansas businessman who went to court to get the minimum wage measure thrown off the ballot, told Steven Greenhouse:
But having lost the lawsuit, he said, he was not fighting the ballot measure any further.
“This is an overwhelmingly popular initiative,” he said, noting that Republican and Democratic lawmakers have endorsed it. “This thing is going to pass whether I jump up and down or spend all my money.”
So a minimum wage increase will just sail through a popular vote in states where the legislatures would never come close to passing it. That's telling. It's almost like legislatures are more responsive to lobbyists than voters.
In any case, Tuesday's votes are likely to be good news for hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers, even though the proposed minimum wages are well below anything you could call a living wage in most of these places.