On Tuesday, Arkansas voters overwhelmingly approved Issue 5, a ballot measure that will raise the state’s minimum wage from $8.50 to $11 by 2021. The vote is expected to raise wages for some 300,000 workers throughout the state. The measure received a staggering 68 percent of the vote in a state that Trump carried by more than 60 percent in 2016.
Arkansas wasn’t the only red state where workers saw a win last night. Missouri’s Proposition B, which will raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.85 to $12 by 2023, passed with 62 percent of the vote. The measure will lift pay for more than 600,000 workers. Missouri’s wage hike comes just three months after its electorate overwhelmingly rejected a right-to-work law at the ballot box.
These labor victories come on the heels of last year’s teacher strikes, which rocked a number of GOP-controlled states. But Negin Owliaei, an inequality researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies, tells In These Times that ballot initiatives to raise wages have been yielding results for years. She pointed to Arkansas’ 2014 wage-hike, which took place in a much different political climate. “We see this in red states, but also blue states and ‘purple states’ like Colorado,” she says. “Workers throughout the country feel like they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
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