A red state whose voters approved paid sick leave now find it repealed thanks to the state’s GOP legislature.
The American Prospect reports:
“Last November, Missouri voters passed a mandatory paid sick leave ballot initiative and joined 17 other states and the District of Columbia with similar statutes on the books. Eligible private-sector employees, about 730,000 people, began accruing one hour of sick leave for every 30 hours worked. The initiative also increased the minimum wage from $12.30 to $13.75 for all private businesses, and also authorized a $1.25 increase in 2026 that would bring the wage up to $15, with an annual Consumer Price Index adjustment taking effect beginning in 2027. Businesses with revenues under $500,000 were exempted from compliance.
Mandatory sick leave and a higher minimum wage were bold moves for a Republican state. Two hundred thousand signatures got the measure, known as Proposition A, onto the ballot, and more than a million and a half voters approved the measure, passing it with a margin of nearly 16 percentage points—a thunderclap in the red state.
‘For 58 to 42, that’s very difficult for any legislator, even experienced ones who have been around a long time, it’s very difficult for them to go against the will of the people, and we understand that,’ Ray McCarty, president of Associated Industries of Missouri, told the Missouri Independent last November right after voters approved the initiative.
The respect for the will of the voters lasted about a month. In December, the state chamber of commerce, associations representing grocery, food service/hospitality, and forest product interests, and others filed a lawsuit against Proposition A in the Missouri Supreme Court. (McCarty was one of the plaintiffs.) The suit contended that the ballot summary for two issues as well as its fiscal impacts were ‘so misleading’ that they called both the election and the result into question.
The judges rejected those arguments in an April decision. Since the measure pertained to a state law and not a constitutional amendment, however, the legislature could intervene. State lawmakers turned the case around as swiftly as the state high court did, but with a radically different result. They repealed the sick leave provisions and left the minimum-wage increase intact, except for one very significant component: the inflation adjustment, a tool that had been on the books since 2007 spanning three previous minimum-wage increases.”
For the rest of the story, visit The American Prospect here.