The Arizona Daily Sun has a more accurate headline on a Howard Fischer story about Ducey and the minimum wage than the Star. Here’s the misleading Star headline I read this morning:

I had to read through the story to find out that, no, Ducey doesn’t think raising the minimum wage may be our best option. He’s trying to head off a ballot measure that would create a significant raise by backing a faux raise. The Sun‘s headline is closer to the truth:

That’s more like it. Ducey is leaning toward backing a minor minimum wage hike coupled with anti-worker provisions to head off a ballot measure that would raise Arizona’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.

The recent history of Arizona’s minimum wage and attempts to increase it is complicated. I’m not an expert, but I’ll do my best to lay it out clearly.

In 2006, voters approved Prop 202 by a 2-to-1 margin which raised the state minimum wage to $6.75 an hour, higher than the $5.15 federal level, and it rises with inflation. Right now, the Arizona rate is $8.05. The measure also allows communities to raise their minimum wage above the state level, which some cities and counties want to do. Ducey and the legislature hate the idea of communities mandating a pay raise for low wage workers, but they can’t make legislative changes to Prop 202, directly. So they tried to create a law that defines “wages” as nothing but pay, which means it wouldn’t include items like health insurance, sick pay, maternity leave or vacation pay. If it was signed into law, cities and counties wouldn’t be able to use Prop 202 as a tool to vote in mandates that make employers provide non-pay benefits, but that wouldn’t stop them from raising the wage itself.

Meanwhile, people are collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would raise Arizona’s minimum wage to $12 an hour—$10 next January, rising to $12  by 2020. Opponents like the Arizona Restaurant and Hospitality Association know the measure could pass. Raising the minimum wage is very popular these days. That’s where Ducey’s backing of a minimum wage ballot measure comes in. The measure he and the restauranteurs are backing would raise the wage to $9.50 by 2020, and it would stop cities and counties from raising minimum wage above that level.

To put the $9.50 wage in perspective, Fischer estimates that inflation will bring the current minimum wage to $8.70 by 2020, so it’s not much of a raise. And it’s possible that workers who count on tips—you know, people employed in restaurants—would see their total compensation drop.

Ducey and the restauranteurs are hoping, with both measures on the ballot, their measure, which will have more money behind it, will pass rather than the $12 an hour measure. If that doesn’t happen, they can still hope that two similar measures on the ballot will confuse the voters and both will go down. What they don’t want is the voters to give a significant increase to low wage workers. 

This article appears in Apr 21-27, 2016.

10 replies on “Minimum Wage Hikes, Ballot Measures, Doug Ducey and the Restaurant and Hospitality Association”

  1. Ya gotta admit Ducey is nothing if not consistent. A minimum age in four years that in inflationary measures would be less than the average worker earns now. An education bill…BALLOT 123 which gives money for education for 3 years at the expense of all the money saved from public lands; the interest from which will cease to exist thereafter; abortion bills that take away the right of a woman to control her own body and on and on and on. Every single measure against the interests of the people of Arizona. But then I look at other governors that Koch has bought like Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Jim Pence, Scott Walker, Joihn Kasick, the governor of Kansas, the toielt governor of North Carolina and I realize they are all in the same suit. They are interchangeable and their policies are exactly alike. Anti human. We won’t have a salary structure that people can live with, or teachers that will fill our schools until Ducey and this legislature are totally defeated.

  3. I just love it when “pro-life” supporters are actually against supporting life after a baby is born. How cute is it that they oppose helping those very children and poor people by cutting welfare programs, fighting against The Affordable Care Act and here in Arizona doing their darndest to cheat kids out of their education? Here’s the funniest part…many of them call themselves christian! Ha, ha, ha!

  4. I don’t think the public school system needs any more funding from ANY source. Arizona spends around $9,000 per student per year on public education and other states spend much more and still it doesn’t seem like anyone is learning anything. Kids come out of inner city schools in other parts of the country almost illiterate. I’m 60 years old and public education was bad when I was a kid. For $9,000 you could probably send your kid to a parochial school or even a private school where they’d get a better education. Just throwing money at a problem won’t fix it. Personally, I think school choice is a better option. Public education needs to go the way of the Dodo bird. Also, people need to take responsibility for their own actions and choices. Liberals seem to think that people should be able to do anything they damn well please without consequences and that the someone else should pay for it! It’s NOT up to the government to take care of you and your children. That’s the job of parents. People should not have children if they can’t take care of them then dump their responsibilities on someone else! If morality and self respect were plan A the night before you wouldn’t need plan B the morning after! As for the minimum wage, well it wasn’t meant for you to live on, raise a family on and get comfortable with. The minimum wage was only meant to be a starting point from which you worked your way up! That’s why it’s called the “MINIMUM” wage! The problem is this country is churning out a bunch of whiny, self-entitled, government-dependent weaklings. So-called “safety nets” have become hammocks! People need to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives and the lives of their children instead of expecting someone else to do it for them. Last, but certainly not least, the government certainly should NOT be providing ANY sort of benefits to illegal immigrants.

  5. The minimum wage was NOT meant for you to live on. What gave anyone that idea? The minimum wage was only meant to be a starting point from which you worked your way up. That’s why they called it the “minimum” wage!

  6. Thomas Borin you are right on the money. Lets see how many of the “its the best we could get” prop 123 supporters also support a so-called minimum wage hike that isn’t, because ITS the “best we could get”. Until Arizona voters start being (dare I say it?) IDEALISTS and asking for what they actually WANT, we will get pathetic half-measures. When you start out by asking for “the best we can get” you get something far less. In fact, you get the Arizona legislature and Governor. All you education supporters out there, is that what our future should look like? I think not. I think our education future should look like truly well-funded teachers and schools, where all kids get a good public education: not a dystopic situation where we (horribly under-)fund public ed for today’s kids at the expense of tomorrow’s.

  7. Interviews with college students shed a spotlight on just how broken education is in the US. They have been educated to replace hard work with hating the rich and falling prey to socialist economic thinking where the federal budget is not their concern. Bankrupt the country and ask for more. We have so perverted our priorities under this President that we can accomplish little if any.

    $20T in debt. And growing.

  8. Wise guy, it seems like your efforts would be best spend opposing adoption costs in AZ for waiting families. These children deserve better, but nobody seems to help. Killing them is not an answer.

    ‘Adoption, in general, is going to cost anywhere between $10,000 to $50,000, depending on the route you choose, the wait you are willing to endure, and whether you are choosing domestic or international adoption.”

    http://scottsdale.citymomsblog.com/2011/05/30/adoption-in-arizona/

    Please get involved to help these children now. Don’t wait for tax dollars to make small improvements.

  10. The socialist utopia that Safier, Borin and others advocate, including the unions who want a floor of the so called ‘living wage’ to ever increase the costs to the rest of us is a failed sham. Look to Europe and other countries like Australia where you can’t eat at a fast food restaurant for less than $12 per person or more!
    There is nothing in our guiding values that argues for this approach resulting in a minimum annual cost per employee approaching $30,000. There are never enough haves to finance the rest. To paraphrase Thatcher. Socialists spend other people’s money until there is nothing left.
    There is a coming giant sucking sound of the drain of our living standard and sovereignty from these failed ‘regressive, not progressive” economic ideologies, and of open borders yielding a cost of living that will hurt everyone except the Democrat elites and celebrities who look upon Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador as their nirvana—all repressive and failed states.
    They are just mouthing the talking points of the Clinton Political Industrial Complex and are as wrong as can be!
    Unfortunately the press and tenured teaching staffs teach a revisionist history that has learnt nothing from the real outcomes of history.

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