By Kate Gibson
CBS Money Watch, March 8, 2016
... With federal efforts to increase pay for the lowest earners stalled by Republican opposition, a slew of states, cities and towns across the country have hiked the local base pay on their own. But other states are doing the opposite, in some cases passing laws prohibiting cities and towns from changing workers' pay and benefits on their own. ... Utah and Alabama are the latest examples of states either defeating measures to increase minimum pay or overriding local efforts to hike pay.
The push to raise the minimum wage and resulting counteroffensive recalls the period that persisted for nearly a decade until the passage of the federal Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. That law mandated taking hourly pay from $5.15 to $7.25 as of July 2009, where it has held ever since.
"It's the revitalization of a trend. During that period when minimum wage was really stuck up to 2007, there was a big growth in living-wage ordinances," Holly Sklar, CEO of Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, a national network of companies that advocates for a minimum wage that's indexed to the cost of living. "Every time you have a long period, the less likely you'll catch up on the ground that was lost, even when you raise the minimum wage."
In Alabama, state lawmakers argued they were thinking about low-income workers remaining employed when they passed a bill that dashed the hopes of an estimated 40,000 workers in Birmingham who were anticipating minimum pay of $10.10 an hour starting in July, thanks to a City Council ordinance passed this summer. Alabama's governor late last month signed into law the measure that stops any individual city from setting its own minimum wage, including the one slated for Birmingham. ...
In other states, the issues are being aired in court. The Missouri Supreme Court in mid-January said it would hear a challenge to St. Louis' minimum wage law this summer. A judge in October blocked the law, which would have hiked the city's minimum pay from $7.65 to $11 an hour. ...
In addition to Alabama, states that have already passed laws preempting local minimum wage laws include Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. ...
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