Republicans love to speak about local control. They want everyone to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. With this gift to business, they keep their boots on the neck of the middle-class and poor as they force this city to lower its minimum wage by a whopping 23%.
If citizens of this state vote for those who slashed their minimum wage, again, they would deserve their fate going forward. It is hard to believe that a party can be as callous to do this. But according to CNN,
While many cities raised their minimum wage over the past weekend, St. Louis will soon see a 23% decrease. A new Missouri law will go into effect August 28 that will override the city’s minimum wage and lower the hourly rate from $10 to $7.70, which is the state’s standard.
In 2015, St. Louis passed an ordinance that raised the minimum wage to $10 in May and would’ve bumped it to $11 in January 2018. This led to a legal battle that wound up in the Missouri Supreme Court — which the city eventually won. But its victory was short-lived. The minimum wage issue pitted St. Louis, a blue city, against the red state legislature and governor. The Missouri General Assembly passed a law earlier this year that prohibits local governments from setting a higher minimum wage than what the state requires.
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, a Democrat, called its passage in May “a setback for working families.”
“The state has preempted cities from enacting laws on many issues, including guns, cold medicine and now our minimum wage,” she said in a statement.
The states rights party is not only usurping the power of local governments in Missouri. They are doing it in Texas as well. The Texas Legislature passed laws that superseded laws adopted by Houston and Austin to force companies like Uber to do more thorough background checks. They also did it by virtually overring the fracking ordinance in Denton Texas. And there is more coming down the line.
States controlled by Republican legislature are ensuring that municipalities and cities are unable to pass laws that affect the interests of their benefactors, the wealthy and the powerful. They are in fact codifying rule by a select minority. If Americans do not begin to act, we will continue the descent into a society where our government, in a more draconian manner, continue to ignore the wants of the majority.
Speak up. Speak out. Vote.