LD1695 - Undercutting Minimum Wage Referendum

(2016)

An Act To Raise the Minimum Wage Incrementally to $10 Per Hour in 2020

Sponsored by Sponsored by: Sen. Andre Cushing (R – Penobscot)

What is the bill?

Raising Maine’s minimum wage was a major focal point of this legislative session. The Maine AFL-CIO has long supported raising wages for working people. We support raising the minimum wage because the cost of groceries, housing and other basics have gone up for years, but wages haven’t come close to keeping up. We can all agree that people working full time should be able to make ends meet. Raising the wage boosts small businesses and strengthens our economy by putting more money in the pockets of Mainers who spend it in their communities. Having grown tired of opposition from corporate lobbyists and many Republican legislators, the Maine AFL-CIO and other allies initiated a citizen initiative to take the question of raising Maine’s minimum wage directly to the voters. We collected more than 90,000 signatures to put a proposal (Question 4) on the November 2016 ballot that will raise Maine’s minimum wage from $7.50 to $9 in 2017 and then one dollar per year until it reaches $12 in 2020. Once it became clear we’d collected the necessary signatures to put this question on the ballot, big business lobbyists tried every trick in the book to derail our initiative. With three different bills, they attempted to attach a weaker “competing measure” question to the citizen initiated referendum. The competing measure was designed to split support for the minimum wage in the hopes that no increase passed. LD 1661 was the minimum wage initiative itself. The Maine AFL-CIO encouraged legislators to vote to send this out to voters as is. LD 1661 was ultimately sent out to voters. LD 674 was a completely unrelated bill that Republicans amended to attach a competing measure to the minimum wage. We opposed their competing measure amendment and this bill was defeated. LD 1695 was a last minute attempt to undercut the ballot initiative. Once it became clear that LD 1695 was designed to undercut the ballot initiative – and would likely be interpreted as a competing measure by the courts – it died in the Senate. We appreciate legislators who honored the will of the voters to ensure that Maine people will have a straight up or down vote on Question 4 and a chance to raise the minimum wage this November.

What happened?

Defeated

Votes