David A. Lieb/AP Photo
The Missouri state Senate convenes on the final day of its regular session, May 17, 2024, in Jefferson City, Missouri. Senate Republicans voted this month to repeal parts of voter-approved ballot measures.
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 They repealed the sick leave provisions and left the minimum-wage increase intact, except for one very significant component: the inflation adjustment, a tool that had been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.
“It’s frustrating, it’s demoralizing, and it makes you lose hope in representative democracy a little bit.”
If legislators undermining the voters’ decision wasn’t bad enough, they also voted to send the abortion question back to voters, despite the fact that Missourians also voted to legalize abortion last November. In the state Senate, Republicans resorted to a procedural nuclear option to cut off a filibuster that Democrats were waging to keep the wage and sick leave statute intact. State Sen. Lincoln Hough (R-Springfield) joined the Democrats to oppose the sick leave move, calling it a “degradation of the institution of the Missouri Senate.” Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R), a supporter of the repeal, has until the end of June to sign the bill into law.
By voting to remove the cost-of-living adjustment to the minimum wage, Missouri’s Republican legislators have made it likely they will face new pressures for another minimum-wage increase a few years down the line. If they don’t, another vote may be in the offing. “If we have a legislature that remains hostile to working families, is there going to be a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage again?” asks Richard von Glahn, policy director of Missouri Jobs with Justice, a worker rights advocacy group. “What outcome are you trying to get to?”
The gambit that state lawmakers and the business leaders resorted to is the latest chapter in a disturbing saga: After voters approve progressive issues like paid sick leave and higher minimum wages, ultraconservatives in Republican states interpret a landslide victory as an invitation not to compromise, much less accede to the voters’ will, but to beat back the offending issue by any means necessary—whether by placing burdensome restrictions on signature gatherers, introducing complex rules about how votes will be counted, or deploying eleventh-hour nuclear parliamentary options.
MIKE DRAPER OWNS RAYGUN, a $12 million Des Moines–based clothing company with ten stores in four states. After failing to score a fellowship after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, he took to selling “Not Penn State” T-shirts around the school and eventually ended up back home in Iowa to work on his fledgling apparel enterprise. His first out-of-state store opened in Kansas City in 2014, and today’s he’s considering expanding to other Missouri cities.
As Draper’s company grew, his employees unionized. But even before that move, the company provided sick leave benefits. An enthusiastic Proposition A supporter, he calls the repeal “infuriating” (the company started selling a “Democracy Dies in Missouri” T-shirt) and takes a dim view of the lawsuit’s assumptions about voters.
“It’s a really insulting way to view the people of your state, that these simpletons only voted for minimum wage and sick leave because they were tricked,” Draper told the Prospect. “The people went to great lengths, time, and money to get this ballot initiative on and to get it passed and to show elected officials what they wanted. And then to have elected officials use parliamentarian tactics to subvert the will of the people? It’s frustrating, it’s demoralizing, and it makes you lose hope in representative democracy a little bit.”
In his view, the push came from corporate giants with lobbyists working to keep those companies’ expenses as low as possible, often disadvantaging communities and smaller businesses in the process. Missouri business leaders worked to re-establish an uneven playing field where employers had full control over hours of work—illnesses and injuries be damned— as well as closing off any legal avenues that an employee might have if an employer failed to comply with the law that voters enacted.
Will voters take note and remember that their state representative or senator voted to repeal sick leave and the inflation adjustment? Will they care, or might they just chalk it up to a business-as-usual world, where the existence of democratic tools is no match for opponents with power and money?
For Draper, part of the problem is Democratic candidates who typically support mandatory paid sick leave and higher minimum wages, but routinely cede elections to Republicans, for example, in Missouri’s rural districts. Von Glahn also sees other impediments to a functioning democracy in Missouri’s term limits, gerrymandered districts, limitless campaign fundraising, and dark-money influences.
Missouri Jobs with Justice was a lead organizer in the coalition of hundreds of community, labor, and business groups that backed Proposition A. The organization hasn’t decided how to specifically respond to the Proposition A repeal. But von Glahn is deeply engaged in one hypothetical: “What happens now if this issue was placed back on the ballot, but this time as a constitutional amendment?”
After the election, Jobs with Justice studied how one cohort of voters understood the stakes. They conducted interviews and focus groups with people who voted for Proposition A and for Donald Trump. Von Glahn says that participants explained specific details about the rate at which employees could earn sick leave and the differences in requirements for small businesses compared to larger ones.
Their explanations “were very, very clear,” von Glahn says. “I expect if this issue is back on the ballot—and we’ll make a decision about that—I think it passes at an even higher rate, percentage than it passed last time.”
This post has been updated.
