It's a fact of American life under a Republican Congress: Many workers must rely on ballot votes rather than their elected representatives to get improvements on the job. Though 2015 is an off-off-year for elections, there were still a few noteworthy ballot measures for workers, and as a result workers in one city will be getting paid sick leave, workers in another will get a minimum wage increase (though one that's not as big as it could have been), and workers in a third saw a minimum wage increase slip out of reach.
In Tacoma, Washington, voters had a choice between two minimum wage levels.
Voters in Tacoma were asked if they wanted a minimum wage hike at all, and early results show more than 58 percent of voters support that. On the second question of how much to hike the wage, 71 percent of voters have opted to phase in a $12 minimum wage instead of an immediate $15 for most businesses. That option received just 29 percent of the votes.
Because the Chamber of Commerce decided to push the gradual $12 minimum in order to fend off the immediate $15 level, an organizer for the $15 campaign said, "We didn’t get everything we wanted, but everything we got the Chamber of Commerce paid for and that is priceless." He's not kidding: The $12 campaign was backed by $118,149 in spending, with the largest amounts coming from the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber of Commerce, the Washington Restaurant Association, and the Tacoma-Pierce County Business Alliance.
In Portland, Maine, voters said no to a $15 minimum wage, which would have applied to businesses with more than 500 employees in 2017 and smaller businesses in 2019.
The vote in the liberal city broke down 57 percent to 43 percent against the measure, according to preliminary returns on Tuesday night.
The minimum wage in Portland is currently $7.50 per hour, a level mandated by the state of Maine. In September, Portland's city council signed off on a $10.10 wage floor slated to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2016. That rate will be boosted to $10.68 in 2017, then bumped annually according to inflation.
It's probably harder to get support for raising the minimum wage when it's already going up by $2.60 an hour in a couple months. The story was different in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the question was
paid sick leave. Read on for the results.
Once it goes into effect, the city’s 25,000 private sector workers will be able to earn an hour of sick time for every 30 they work, capped at five days a year for those at companies with 10 or more employees and at three days at smaller companies, to care for themselves or a sick family member. Anyone who comes into contact with the public as part of their work, though, such as food service and daycare employees, will be able to get five days a year.
Elizabeth is New Jersey's fourth-largest city, and the three cities ahead of it—Newark, Jersey City, and Paterson—already have paid sick leave laws, along with
several others. California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Oregon all have paid sick leave laws, with
Massachusetts voters having approved that in a 2014 ballot measure. In 2014, voters also passed
minimum wage increases in four states and a couple of cities.
