State Sen. Randy Richardville figures he and his Republican legislative colleagues know what a minimum-wage worker is worth — and they’re not interested in voters’ two cents.
So the senate majority leader is taking steps to ensure that Michigan’s minimum wage, currently set at a miserly $7.40 an hour, won’t be allowed to rise above $8.15 an hour, no matter how many voters think it should.
A group known as Raise Michigan is gathering signatures for a November ballot proposal that would ask voters to raise the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 by 2017 and index it to inflation thereafter.
Restaurant owners and some other employers argue the increase is too steep. Another GOP lawmaker, Sen. Rick Jones, R-Grand Ledge, has introduced a bill that would, like Richardville’s proposal, authorize a faster but more modest hike to $8.15.
I think a 75-cent hike does too little to make up the ground Michigan’s working poor have lost since the minimum wage was last increased in 2006. But Richardville and Jones certainly have every right to see whether they can take the steam out of Raise Michigan’s ballot drive by delivering a smaller increase before November.
After all, if voters think a minimum wage of $8.15 is too low, they can always ratchet it upward by signing Raise Michigan’s petitions and approving the $10.10 standard in November. Right?
But wait! Do Richardville and his colleagues really want to leave something this important to voters? Of course they don’t.
Never mind that giving voters the final word is precisely what the framers of Michigan’s constitution had in mind when they established the ballot initiative process in the first place. This is the minimum wage we’re talking about — and raising it could cost the large and small-business owners who bankroll Richardville’s party some serious coin.
So instead of amending the state’s current minimum-wage statute (as Jones’ bill would do), Richardville’s proposal would repeal that statute and replace it with a new, essentially similar one. His strategy — which he readily copped to in a phone conversation Friday afternoon — is to make sure that, even if Raise Michigan succeeds in its bid to amend the current minimum-wage statute, it won’t count, because the statute they want to amend will have ceased to exist.
Clever, eh?
Richardville and his colleagues haven’t always been so contemptuous of the ballot initiative process. Why, just last year, when Right to Life of Michigan collected sufficient signatures to put a controversial bill restricting private insurance coverage for abortions before voters this November, Republican legislators decided to save the organization the expense and risk of a ballot campaign by adopting the measure outright.
But forcing women to pay more for abortions is one thing; forcing employers to pay their workers a living wage is quite another. And in Richardville’s view, permitting voters to exercise their constitutional right to raise the minimum wage is a bridge too far.
“The biggest number, for me, is the unemployment rate,” Richardville said. Although many economists disagree, it’s the GOP’s conviction that substantially boosting the minimum wage will spur employers to lay off workers, stalling the state’s economic recovery.
“If it wasn’t a situation I felt was critical, I’d let the (ballot initiative) process go along as it is,” the Monroe Republican added. “This is just too important.”
So Republicans have decided to short-circuit that process — you know, the untidy one ordained in Michigan’s constitution — in favor of closed caucus meetings where Republicans who control the Legislature can wire an outcome more palatable to their patrons.
Richardville is a modest, soft-spoken fellow. But his proposal betrays the sort of arrogant disregard for the democratic process that the ballot initiative was designed to keep in check.
More disturbingly, this is the third time Republicans have used this sort of subterfuge to subvert the initiative process since they won control of all three branches of state government in 2010. Previous casualties include a voter initiative to repeal an unpopular emergency manager law and a measure to permit wolf hunting.
The pattern is clear: If the electorate is threatening to turn on you, change the rules.
And if you’re a voter who doesn’t like what you’re seeing, maybe you should move elsewhere — or just keep your eyes (and your mouth) shut.