Portside

The American Legislative Exchange Council is against raising the minimum hourly wage. We turn to Missouri’s statehouse. Lawmakers there passed bills barring every past and future law to hike the minimum wage recently.

“By enacting legislation today to prohibit all past and future local

minimum wage laws in Missouri, the Missouri state legislature dealt a

blow to democracy and workers in the state,” said Christine Owens,

executive director at the National Employment Law Project.

“Legislators have stripped Missouri communities of their long-standing

rights and taken away all hope for cities like St. Louis of addressing

low wages that deny people the opportunity to support themselves

through work.”

Missouri’s anti-minimum wage legislation mirrors a bill that Iowa

state lawmakers passed. In Iowa, that bill reverses local minimum wage

hikes that counties approved, while prohibiting cities and counties

from changing the standards for wages and benefits.

What is going on, and why? According to the NELP, state legislatures

are responding to popular sentiments to increase minimum wage rates.

Over 40 cities and counties have enacted increased minimum wages.

However, 24 states have approved laws to roll back these minimum wage

increases.

The University of California at Berkeley Labor Center maintains an

inventory of US city and county minimum wage ordinances. There are

wage levels, scheduled increases and other law details, as well as

links to the ordinances.

Back to ALEC. It argues that raising the minimum wage harms those who

earn low pay. This stance echoes businesses that oppose low-wage

workers earning higher hourly rates.

However, public support for raising the minimum wage is strong. The

same US public opposes misnamed “free-trade” pacts that help

capitalists pay workers abroad less than Americans earning the minimum

wage.

“The only wages ALEC seems to like are the $1 an hour wages paid in

countries like Vietnam,” said Mary Bottari, deputy director of the

Center for Media and Democracy. “ALEC was a huge backer of the Trans

Pacific Partnership and every trade agreement that has shipped US jobs

overseas.”

The CMD has been investigating the involvement of the Kochs,

billionaire GOP funders of ALEC. Let us not, though, focus solely on

Republicans and their wealthy donors such as the Kochs in pushing a

corporate agenda that runs roughshod over working families.

Recall the role of Democratic presidents, for instance, in promoting

corporate investment in low-wage foreign labor. Former President Obama

also backed the TPP. On that note, Hillary Clinton’s failed White

House run in part claimed to continue Obama’s legacy on investment and

trade.

GOP President Donald J. Trump made opposition to the North American

Free Trade Agreement, enacted under Democratic President Bill Clinton

in 1994 [with Republican support], central to his successful 2016

campaign for the White House. During that recent campaign, Secretary

Clinton had little in the way of a solid response to candidate Trump’s

NAFTA critique, which resonated in Rust Belt states where NAFTA has

wrecked communities, devastating working families.

To be clear, ALEC has its eyes on the ball, and is moving it down the

court. The daily drama in the nation’s capital can distract us from

ALEC’s politics.

“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other

pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become

a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive

lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according

to an NELP statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption

bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”

This is not rocket science. Rather, ALEC’s agenda, less sexy than the

Kardashians on social media, is class warfare of the 1% against the

99%.

Seth Sandronsky is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media

Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2017.