St. Louis Gave Workers a Wage Hike. Missouri Republicans Are Taking it Away.

B

blackascoal

The Force is With Me
On August 28, St. Louis may become the first city in the United States to see its minimum wage fall, from $10 an hour to $7.70 an hour, as the Missouri statehouse enables a pay cut for some 35,000 workers.

That’s the date when a new state pre-emption law, drafted specifically to target St. Louis, is scheduled to take effect. The Missouri measure will override the city’s own minimum wage increase, which was implemented in May after a two-year court battle, and end a three-month period during which fast food, retail, and other workers in the city were required to be paid hundreds of dollars in additional income.

Republican-run states forcing Democrat-run cities to not raise the minimum wage is a story we’ve seen before, of course. Alabama thwarted Birmingham’s efforts in February of last year; Ohio stopped Cleveland in December. More than a dozen other states have passed pre-emptive pre-emptions, abolishing municipal wage laws before any cities or counties consider them. GOP politicians usually say minimum wage ordinances won’t actually help workers, but they also defend the pre-emptions in principle, because they preserve a “uniform regulatory environment.”

St. Louis is a unique case. Shortly after the city passed its minimum wage law in 2015, the Legislature passed—over the veto of then-Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat—a pre-emption law to abolish all municipal wage laws not in effect on*Aug. 28, 2015, the exact day the city passed the ordinance.* But it was immediately enjoined in a lawsuit filed by local business interests that went all the way to the state Supreme Court. In May, that body decided St. Louis did have the authority to enact a wage law.

So the Missouri Legislature went back and drafted a more specific law that would squash the local ordinance. The idea was to fast-track it in March, before the local wage hike took effect. Thanks to the quirky practices of Jefferson City, though, Democratic state senators managed to stall the measure, forcing Republicans to use a procedural measure to jam the bill through in the waning hours of the session last week.

The St. Louis policy was projected to give an immediate raise of about $2,400 a year to approximately 35,000 workers, before $10 went up to $11 on Jan. 1, 2018. Broadly speaking, there’s a lot of debate over how local wage floors affect employment markets, worker income, hiring, and hours. (Read my colleague Jordan Weissmann’s piece on the complex effects of Seattle’s $12 to $13 minimum wage.)

One thing is clear, though: Minimum wage hikes are popular. More than half of all registered voters supported a $15 wage floor in 2016, according to Pew, much higher than what St. Louis had targeted. And the idea of taking away a raise that has already been given seems particularly cruel; Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who believes the local ordinance will kill jobs, will not attach his signature to the bill, allowing it instead to pass without it. (There is no pocket veto in Missouri.)

A template for St. Louis progressives going forward? Deep-red Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, threatened in January of 2016 to withhold funding from cities like Tempe, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix that had considered or passed various types of worker protections. In November, Arizona voters—while voting for a Republican senator and for Donald Trump—opted to enact a statewide minimum wage increase at the ballot, tying Ducey’s hands.*Now that’s a uniform regulatory environment
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox..._missouri_republicans_are_taking_it_away.html
 
Lower minimum wage means more jobs, you idiot.

This demand for higher MW is funded by the restaurant biz. It wants to bankrupt the fast food joints. THINK
 
Text Drivers are Killers said:
Lower minimum wage means more jobs, you idiot.

This demand for higher MW is funded by the restaurant biz. It wants to bankrupt the fast food joints. THINK
Click to expand...
shhhh, blackascrap does not want reasonable argument, this isn't about facts, it's so he can whine and babble like a little girl.

Suddenly he's concerned about the little guy in St. Louis, bet he has three or four of them living with him to help them out. LOLOLOLOLO
 
Text Drivers are Killers said:
Lower minimum wage means more jobs, you idiot.

This demand for higher MW is funded by the restaurant biz. It wants to bankrupt the fast food joints. THINK
Click to expand...

Goddamn that was stupid .. which is no surprise coming from you.

Why not lower wages to one dollar an hour .. according to you that will mean full employment. Stupid.

Restaurants want to bankrupt the fast food industry by raising the minimum wage TO THE SAME RATES THEY TOO WILL HAVE TO PAY????? :rofl2: and you had the nerve to follow that stupid shit with "THINK" :rofl2:

OK :0)
 
blackascoal said:
Goddamn that was stupid .. which is no surprise coming from you.

Why not lower wages to one dollar an hour .. according to you that will mean full employment. Stupid.

Restaurants want to bankrupt the fast food industry by raising the minimum wage TO THE SAME RATES THEY TOO WILL HAVE TO PAY????? :rofl2: and you had the nerve to follow that stupid shit with "THINK" :rofl2:

OK :0)
Click to expand...

Raise the MW to $100 an hour and you'll all be rich.
 
blackascrap, please, think before you speak. Minimum wage at 10.oo vs 7.7o / hr.

2.30 more an hour, 40 hour week you are giving this person another 65 dollars a week after taxes, well aren't you the great savior riding in on the white horse. lololol

Minimum wage jobs were never meant to sustain anyone, minimum wage jobs are meant for either young kids working to make spending money while going to school, or summer jobs.

Anyone trying to live long term off of a minimum wage job, support a family, housing etc. should get a plan B.
The only thing 10 an hour vs 7.70 an hour will do is cause the employer to get rid of a worker or two to make up the difference,
OR
charge me more money for the service / product involved.

like most everything a liberal opines on you are clueless, uninformed, and glaringly reaching for another glass of whine
lololol
 
Dumping frozen beef, chicken, fish and potatoes into automatically timed baskets in oil,
Stuffing them into paper bags,
Handing customers a cup to get their own beverages,
Pointing the customer in the direction where they can get their own condiments and napkins,
Computerized registers that show the employee how much change to give :palm:,
Mopping the floors and occasionally wiping down tables,
Free uniform, food discounts...

Not worth $10 an hour. Fast food joints are for part-time from age 15 or supplemental income for retirees or for anyone who doesn't require a high-paying job. These jobs are great for preparing young teens for the real world. It's like paid training for learning conversation skills, comprehension, punctuality, responsibility, obedience, tact, civility, etc. for more substantial employment later when they hopefully move out of mommy and daddy's basement and become self-sufficient.

I worked in an actual restaurant when I was a high school junior a couple hours every day after school. The minimum wage then was $1.30/hr. Two months after I graduated and turned 18, I moved out, got my own apartment on Miami Beach and immediately started tending bar making usually 10 times that amount between salary and tips.
 
The name of my song is 'Small Wonder.'

Small wonder why 9 out of the 10 poorest states .. and 97 out of 100 poorest counties in America are all controlled by republicans.

What are the unemployment rates in those poor ass states and districts I wonder .. because according to republicans, they should all be near full employment. .. but they aren't.

Are businesses exploding in these poor ass states and districts .. according to republicans peasant wages creates more business and jobs .. yet they control 90% of poor ass states and 97% of poor ass counties.

Small wonder.
 
blackascoal said:
The name of my song is 'Small Wonder.'

Small wonder why 9 out of the 10 poorest states .. and 97 out of 100 poorest counties in America are all controlled by republicans.

What are the unemployment rates in those poor ass states and districts I wonder .. because according to republicans, they should all be near full employment. .. but they aren't.

Are businesses exploding in these poor ass states and districts .. according to republicans peasant wages creates more business and jobs .. yet they control 90% of poor ass states and 97% of poor ass counties.

Small wonder.
Click to expand...

And here everyone thought it would be about the size of your head.
 
blackascoal said:
Goddamn that was stupid .. which is no surprise coming from you.

Why not lower wages to one dollar an hour .. according to you that will mean full employment. Stupid.

Restaurants want to bankrupt the fast food industry by raising the minimum wage TO THE SAME RATES THEY TOO WILL HAVE TO PAY????? :rofl2: and you had the nerve to follow that stupid shit with "THINK" :rofl2:

OK :0)
Click to expand...
You stupid communist.

Minimum wage is for noobs. $7.70 hr. works better because it's a starting point. It's for recent high school graduates, not for dumbasses who decide to flip burgers for the rest of their lives.
 
Last edited:
blackascoal said:
The name of my song is 'Small Wonder.'

Small wonder why 9 out of the 10 poorest states .. and 97 out of 100 poorest counties in America are all controlled by republicans.

What are the unemployment rates in those poor ass states and districts I wonder .. because according to republicans, they should all be near full employment. .. but they aren't.

Are businesses exploding in these poor ass states and districts .. according to republicans peasant wages creates more business and jobs .. yet they control 90% of poor ass states and 97% of poor ass counties.

Small wonder.
Click to expand...

Most all of those poorest counties are in rural areas. There is much urban poverty in this country but it is offset by adjacent well to do areas which skew the statistics.
 
Solved: Why Poor States Are Red and Rich States Are Blue


One of the great conundrums of the American political scene is why the poorer states, colloquially known as "red" states, tend to vote Republican or conservative, while the richer states, the "blue" ones (and let it be said that this is very confusing for this European, for over here the colours tend to work the other way around, red is Labour, or left wing) tend to vote Democrat. We would think that it should be the other way around, the poor people voting for more from that Great Big Pinata which is government. But it seems that there's a simple solution to this: the red states aren't actually poorer in terms of the way people live.

If we measure by consumption patterns then it's the blue states that are poor, the red states that are rich:

Continued at https://www.forbes.com/sites/timwor...re-red-and-rich-states-are-blue/#25e5a0e31d60
 
blackascoal said:
On August 28, St. Louis may become the first city in the United States to see its minimum wage fall, from $10 an hour to $7.70 an hour, as the Missouri statehouse enables a pay cut for some 35,000 workers.

That’s the date when a new state pre-emption law, drafted specifically to target St. Louis, is scheduled to take effect. The Missouri measure will override the city’s own minimum wage increase, which was implemented in May after a two-year court battle, and end a three-month period during which fast food, retail, and other workers in the city were required to be paid hundreds of dollars in additional income.

Republican-run states forcing Democrat-run cities to not raise the minimum wage is a story we’ve seen before, of course. Alabama thwarted Birmingham’s efforts in February of last year; Ohio stopped Cleveland in December. More than a dozen other states have passed pre-emptive pre-emptions, abolishing municipal wage laws before any cities or counties consider them. GOP politicians usually say minimum wage ordinances won’t actually help workers, but they also defend the pre-emptions in principle, because they preserve a “uniform regulatory environment.”

St. Louis is a unique case. Shortly after the city passed its minimum wage law in 2015, the Legislature passed—over the veto of then-Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat—a pre-emption law to abolish all municipal wage laws not in effect on*Aug. 28, 2015, the exact day the city passed the ordinance.* But it was immediately enjoined in a lawsuit filed by local business interests that went all the way to the state Supreme Court. In May, that body decided St. Louis did have the authority to enact a wage law.

So the Missouri Legislature went back and drafted a more specific law that would squash the local ordinance. The idea was to fast-track it in March, before the local wage hike took effect. Thanks to the quirky practices of Jefferson City, though, Democratic state senators managed to stall the measure, forcing Republicans to use a procedural measure to jam the bill through in the waning hours of the session last week.

The St. Louis policy was projected to give an immediate raise of about $2,400 a year to approximately 35,000 workers, before $10 went up to $11 on Jan. 1, 2018. Broadly speaking, there’s a lot of debate over how local wage floors affect employment markets, worker income, hiring, and hours. (Read my colleague Jordan Weissmann’s piece on the complex effects of Seattle’s $12 to $13 minimum wage.)

One thing is clear, though: Minimum wage hikes are popular. More than half of all registered voters supported a $15 wage floor in 2016, according to Pew, much higher than what St. Louis had targeted. And the idea of taking away a raise that has already been given seems particularly cruel; Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who believes the local ordinance will kill jobs, will not attach his signature to the bill, allowing it instead to pass without it. (There is no pocket veto in Missouri.)

A template for St. Louis progressives going forward? Deep-red Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, threatened in January of 2016 to withhold funding from cities like Tempe, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix that had considered or passed various types of worker protections. In November, Arizona voters—while voting for a Republican senator and for Donald Trump—opted to enact a statewide minimum wage increase at the ballot, tying Ducey’s hands.*Now that’s a uniform regulatory environment
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox..._missouri_republicans_are_taking_it_away.html
Click to expand...

I heard about this pay cut in the minimum wage in St Louis about a week ago, $10 an hour is not a living wage either, let alone $7.70 an hour! To the republicans during this, you show us how to live on $7.70 an hour or even $10 an hour?!! There is not a damn thing I could do for you for $7.70 and hour?!!
9326b38304e3be506ea366b98b026b17.jpg
 
^ The cartoon is misleading. Waiters make very good money from their tips. I was a bartender for 25 years and none of us even cared if we were handed a "salary" or not. Those minimum wage paychecks would just go straight into our savings accounts and leave it there untouched.
 
cawacko said:
Most all of those poorest counties are in rural areas. There is much urban poverty in this country but it is offset by adjacent well to do areas which skew the statistics.
Click to expand...

Rural area STATES?

That's an excuse, not the problem.

Republicans legislate against these poor red states and districts .. who also happen to be the biggest moochers of federal dollars in the country.

GOP Medicaid cuts to hit rural America hardest, report finds

Medicaid's enrollment has swollen to more than 72 million in recent years, and the ranks of uninsured Americans has fallen to 9% in 2015 from 13% in 2013. That's largely due to the Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility with federal funds. Thirty-one states, plus the District of Columbia did so.

Those gains may be in jeopardy under the House GOP health care bill that would replace major parts of the ACA -- known as Obamacare -- and dramatically cut federal funding for Medicaid. The House passed the legislation, the American Health Care Act, in May.

"There is no doubt that children and families in small towns would be disproportionately harmed by cuts to Medicaid," said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown's Center for Children and Families.

Medicaid covered 45% of children and 16% of adults in small towns and rural areas in 2015, according to the center's report. Those figures are lower in metropolitan areas -- 38% of children and 15% of adults.

Rural areas have larger Medicaid populations because more people with disabilities live there, household incomes tend to be lower, unemployment rates higher and jobs with employer-paid insurance less common, the report found.

In states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, the rate of uninsured people in small towns and rural areas fell by 11 percentage points between 2008-09 and 2014-15 -- from 22% to 11%, the report said. That was slightly larger than the decrease in metro areas of expansion states.

If the House bill became law, Medicaid would be cut by more than $800 billion over 10 years. That would lead to higher uninsured rates and reduce Americans' access to health care, Alker said.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/07/news/economy/gop-medicaid-rural/index.html

They, REPUBLICANS .. want to take that money from Medicaid and their constituents in their own poor ass states and districts AND GIVE IT TO THEMSELVES.

Same is true of minimum wage increases. They don't want to see it rise because they don't give a fuck about the poor even among their own constituency.
 
blackascoal said:
Rural area STATES?

That's an excuse, not the problem.

Republicans legislate against these poor red states and districts .. who also happen to be the biggest moochers of federal dollars in the country.

GOP Medicaid cuts to hit rural America hardest, report finds

Medicaid's enrollment has swollen to more than 72 million in recent years, and the ranks of uninsured Americans has fallen to 9% in 2015 from 13% in 2013. That's largely due to the Affordable Care Act, which allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility with federal funds. Thirty-one states, plus the District of Columbia did so.

Those gains may be in jeopardy under the House GOP health care bill that would replace major parts of the ACA -- known as Obamacare -- and dramatically cut federal funding for Medicaid. The House passed the legislation, the American Health Care Act, in May.

"There is no doubt that children and families in small towns would be disproportionately harmed by cuts to Medicaid," said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown's Center for Children and Families.

Medicaid covered 45% of children and 16% of adults in small towns and rural areas in 2015, according to the center's report. Those figures are lower in metropolitan areas -- 38% of children and 15% of adults.

Rural areas have larger Medicaid populations because more people with disabilities live there, household incomes tend to be lower, unemployment rates higher and jobs with employer-paid insurance less common, the report found.

In states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, the rate of uninsured people in small towns and rural areas fell by 11 percentage points between 2008-09 and 2014-15 -- from 22% to 11%, the report said. That was slightly larger than the decrease in metro areas of expansion states.

If the House bill became law, Medicaid would be cut by more than $800 billion over 10 years. That would lead to higher uninsured rates and reduce Americans' access to health care, Alker said.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/07/news/economy/gop-medicaid-rural/index.html

They, REPUBLICANS .. want to take that money from Medicaid and their constituents in their own poor ass states and districts AND GIVE IT TO THEMSELVES.

Same is true of minimum wage increases. They don't want to see it rise because they don't give a fuck about the poor even among their own constituency.
Click to expand...

There was a meme that went around a couple of years ago that 97 of the poorest 100 counties in the U.S. were in red states. Polifact did a review of it and almost of the counties are rural (and many are located near Appalachia). There is definitely rural poverty in America just as there is urban poverty however urban poverty gets covered up in the statistics by rich neighbors.

California has the highest poverty rate of any state so what are we doing wrong here?
 
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