Lifting wages at the ballot box.

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah

This November, ballot measures are becoming the tool of choice for progressive activists, and low-wage workers' issues are on the agenda now in a way they haven't been in years.

Much of the credit goes to the workers at Walmart and fast-food restaurants around the country who've gone on strike after strike, demanding "$15 an hour and a union."

The first place to actually make $15 an hour the law was the town of SeaTac, Washington, which surrounds the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. A November 2013 ballot initiative passed by a narrow margin. Seven months later, the city of Seattle passed a law that will incrementally raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2019.

"We've seen states and cities taking action this year out of frustration with Congressional gridlock," says Jack Temple, a policy analyst with the National Employment Law Project, "and now we're seeing voters taking action out of frustration with state legislatures that have dropped the ball."

The states that have a higher minimum wage on the ballot this fall, Temple notes, are not ones usually considered progressive--Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In all of these, the minimum wage would increase to at least $8.50 an hour. The Alaska proposal would raise it to $8.75 by January 1, 2015, and to $9.75 the next year. And then it would permanently index its wage to inflation or to $1 more than the federal minimum. Not bad for so-called red states.

"Voters don't see this issue as a conservative or a progressive issue. They see it as a common sense issue," Temple says. "That's why when you actually take this issue to the voters, you see it pass each and every time with an overwhelming majority support."

In state after state, coalitions built of unions, community organizations, and, particularly in the more conservative states, interfaith organizations have moved to harness the energy created by the low-wage workers' movement.

Liberal states are also moving quickly. Massachusetts just passed what will be the highest statewide minimum wage in the country, $11 an hour, under pressure from, you guessed it, a ballot initiative campaign. There, the minimum wage was originally coupled with an initiative for paid sick days, but the state legislature took action in June and passed a bill, then signed into law by Governor Deval Patrick, that raises the wage incrementally to $11 by 2017. The Raise Up Massachusetts coalition is now focusing exclusively on the paid sick days...