States Move to Roll Back City Minimum-Wage Raises

This post first appeared at The Nation.

Last August, after a campaign led by a coalition of labor advocates and neighborhood organizations, Birmingham became the first city in the Deep South to raise its minimum wage. The increase was relatively modest — it sought to raise the city’s pay floor incrementally from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour by 2017 — but after six years without a national minimum-wage boost, supporters celebrated the move as an essential step in lifting the city’s working poor out of poverty.

Soon after the ordinance passed, minimum-wage initiatives began to gain momentum in two other Alabama cities, Tuscaloosa and Huntsville. These efforts were followed by proposals for wage hikes in the cities of Selma and Mobile. The movement to lift local minimum wages, which had recently won high-profile victories in places like Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago, was beginning to spread throughout one of America’s reddest states.

This did not sit well with Republicans in Alabama’s legislature, however. A month after the Birmingham vote, conservative members of Alabama’s House of Representatives began eyeing a bill that would prohibit cities from setting their own minimum wages ....