Missouri voted to raise minimum wage to $12. Lawmaker wants to delay the increase

A Missouri lawmaker wants to stall the minimum wage hikes that voters approved statewide less than three years ago.

Rep. Cody Smith’s bill would slow down the phased-in increases approved in 2018, which raised the state’s minimum wage to $10.30 an hour this year and will bring it to $12 an hour by 2023. Instead, he wants to delay the next raise until 2024 and allow the wage floor to rise to $12 in 2026.

His original proposal would have eliminated the increases altogether and lowered the minimum wage by more than $3 an hour to the federal requirement of $7.25. The proposal outraged labor groups and activists who are pushing for a $15 minimum wage.

Smith, a Carthage Republican, on Tuesday submitted to the House Special Committee on Small Business a revised bill that would instead slow down the increases. He said the bill was prompted by complaints from nursing homes and in-home health care providers that cannot afford to raise wages because their patients are paid for through Medicaid.

“I think we need to take urgent action on providing some relief to those providers,” Smith, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said. “We need to give them more time to adapt to increasing minimum wage laws.”

The facilities, he said, struggle to retain workers because competitors can raise wages and pass costs to customers.

When asked by Rep. Steve Butz, a St. Louis Democrat, how keeping the minimum wage low would help recruit workers, Smith said only that the proposal is not a “silver bullet” and wage hikes exacerbate the problem.

“It gets worse as the minimum wage goes up if they are already struggling to compete,” Smith said.

“If you want good employees you have got to pay,” Butz countered.

Smith’s argument, supported by the Missouri Health Care Association and Missouri Assisted Living Association, was largely rejected by House Democrats who argued Smith should increase state reimbursements to the facilities through the budget.

But it gave Republican lawmakers the opportunity to blast the ongoing wage increases.

“I’m fed up with one-size-fits-all laws,” said Rep. Danny Busick, a Newtown Republican. “They kill rural Missouri. They are voted by the people in Kansas City and St. Louis but they don’t understand what’s happening in Newtown, Missouri.”

The 2018 ballot initiative followed a state law passed in 2017 that prohibited cities from setting their own minimum wages. The law immediately stymied a measure approved by Kansas City voters to raise the wage floor locally to $10 an hour.

The ballot initiative passed alongside a slate of other progressive-backed proposals in 2018, including the legalization of medical marijuana and the sweeping ethics and redistricting reforms package known as Clean Missouri. In another ballot initiative pushed by Republican lawmakers last year, voters have already repealed Clean Missouri before the redistricting changes were able to go into effect.

This story was originally published March 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.