Florida gets it right: raising the minimum wage

Last month, nearly four hundred thousand Florida workers got a dollar-an-hour raise. It wasn't because employers had suddenly become more generous. In November, Florida voters had approved a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage to $6.15 an hour--a dollar higher than the federal level. Furthermore, Florida's new minimum wage is pegged to inflation. In the future, the state's lowest-paid workers will receive automatic increases to keep pace with the cost of living.

The initiative's margin of victory was a whopping 72 to 28 percent (4.95 million votes to 1.96), far larger than George W. Bush's 300,000 majority over John Kerry in the state. Many middle-class voters who cast their ballot for Bush were also critical in putting the minimum-wage referendum over the top. In fact, the measure won in every county in the state, including conservative counties like Escambia and Santa Rosa in the Florida Panhandle, where military bases and retired military veterans dominate the political culture. In those counties, more than two-thirds of voters supported the wage boost--about the same margin given Bush. This despite opposition to the initiative by Florida governor Jeb Bush, by the state Republican Party (which controls both houses of the legislature), and by Florida's business community. While most Democratic candidates favored the measure, their vocal support was muted, and Kerry scarcely mentioned it. How, then, did it prove victorious?

In 2003, ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), a national community-organizing group with a hundred and sixty thousand dues-paying members in twenty-eight states, commissioned a Florida poll that found widespread support for increasing the state's minimum wage. One study estimated that the state's low-income workers would get a cumulative $443 million salary increase. Since poorly paid workers spend almost all their income on basic necessities, the study predicted a boost in consumer spending that would have a ripple effect across Florida's economy.

Floridians for All, a coalition of labor unions, community organizations, churches, senior-citizen groups, and others that ACORN spearheaded, publicized this information and in August 2004 launched a campaign that eventually deployed a field staff of forty, plus sixty canvassers, and more than two thousand volunteers to register voters, gather signatures to put the minimum-wage measure on the ballot, and mobilize a get-out-the-vote effort. The coalition succeeded in registering more than two hundred thousand new voters, mostly low-income African Americans and Latinos in the state's largest urban areas.

Florida's business community--especially its large restaurant and tourism industry--mounted an expensive counteroffensive. Business argued that the proposed amendment was unnecessary, and that most of Florida's minimum-wage workers were under the age of twenty-five or part-time workers. It produced a series of television ads that likened the initiative to the recent spate of hurricanes that had hit the state, calling the proposal a sure job killer. Floridians for All countered with ads on cable TV. They featured a working mom, grocery bags in one arm, a child in the other, urging viewers to vote yes on the wage-hike initiative to help families meet the rising costs of basic necessities.

After the election, Brian Kettenring, an ACORN organizer, explained that the minimum-wage campaign brought many people out to vote who otherwise might have stayed home. "Most of those new voters probably voted for Kerry," Kettenring said, "which narrowed Bush's margin. But we also found that lots of swing voters, who weren't sure how they were going to vote for president, enthusiastically supported raising the minimum wage."

The same day that Floridians voted to improve the plight of their working poor, Nevadans did so too. While Bush beat Kerry by 21,500 votes in Nevada, residents backed a dollar-an-hour wage boost by 293,328 votes--68.3 percent of those cast. All counties in the state supported the initiative, including those that went strongly for the president.

There are now thirteen states with a minimum wage higher than the federal level. Washington State has the highest--$7.35 an hour, adjusted annually for inflation--the result of a ballot initiative in 1998. In Oregon, the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, thanks to a similar measure in 2002. In 2003, San Francisco enacted a municipal minimum wage that is now $8.50 an hour. And the same year, voters in Santa Fe approved a wage boost at local businesses with twenty-five or more employees, to $8.50 an hour. It will rise to $9.50 next year, and to $10.50 in 2008.

Since its victory in Florida, ACORN and its labor allies have begun talking about grass-roots minimum-wage initiatives in other states in 2006, particularly where Democrats have a chance to expand, or hold on to, key offices. Campaigns are already underway in Ohio, Michigan, and Arizona, and ACORN is exploring possibilities in six other states and several cities. The strategy is designed to increase voter turnout and to provide candidates with a clear economic-justice issue. Organizers also hope to reach out to white, church-going voters (including Republicans) who earn barely enough to stay above the poverty line. (In part, they seek to counter right-wing initiatives on gay marriage and opposition to affirmative action.) Activists also hope this state-by-state strategy will lay the groundwork for raising the federal minimum wage. The last such raise--to $5.15 an hour in 1997--has been completely eroded by inflation. A nurse's aide earning that figure has to support herself and raise her two children on $10,700 a year.