Politicians, don’t overturn Missouri’s vote on minimum wage, sick time | Opinion
Whether we’re Black, white or brown, we all want the freedom to prosper, to raise our families and live stable, dignified lives. It’s why workers throughout our country’s history have organized and fought to win unions and change policies that can transform all of our lives, from winning the eight-hour workday and 40-hour workweek, to guaranteeing Americans the weekend and time to rest on and off the job, to protecting children’s right to enjoy their innocence and receive an education, free from exhausting and dangerous labor.
On May 3, hundreds of us — low-wage workers, allies with labor, faith and civil rights groups, and community members who believe that we all deserve to lead happier, healthier and safer lives — turned out at UAW Local 249 to celebrate International Workers’ Day. We took time to rejoice in our rights as workers, and the legacy we are building upon as we come together to beat back attacks on these rights by greedy corporations and their stooges in the Missouri statehouse.
In November, we won Proposition A, a ballot measure to guarantee Missouri workers like me the freedom to earn paid sick days and a higher minimum wage, with the strong bipartisan support of more than 1.6 million Missourians on Election Day.
I was thrilled to cast my vote for it.
I’ve worked at Arby’s for five years. I’ve had to fight for every raise that I’ve gotten, and I was one of the many workers whose pay got bumped to $13.75 on Jan. 1 of this year, and will go up to $15 an hour next January. Arby’s has also never offered me paid sick leave, or paid maternity leave for that matter when I had my three children. And so as of May 1, May Day, I became one of 700,000 Missouri workers who now have the chance to earn paid sick days.
As a mother, it means a lot to me to have won these freedoms. Sometimes we are short on funds to get diapers, wipes, formula and other things that we need for the kids. These items are expensive to begin with, and it doesn’t help that the price of everything is going up. Landlords have evicted us from our homes multiple times because keeping up with the cost of rent is impossible. We’re dealing with that right now.
And not having paid sick leave has made it more difficult to get to my kids’ doctor appointments. A lot of times I have to cancel their appointments because Arby’s changes my work schedule so much. I’ve been late to or missed important prenatal appointments just so I could feed my family. I shouldn’t have had to worry about that, especially since I had high-risk pregnancies and wasn’t able to monitor them the way I needed to.
When my kids are sick, I’ve had to make the impossible choice to go into work when all I want is to be there for them. If I didn’t, we might miss out on the ability to afford medicine that can help them get better.
No matter how hard I work to provide for my family, poverty is suffocating us.
Prop A might not solve all our problems, but it does offer us some breathing room.
Fast food workers like me joined Stand Up KC and organized our strength in numbers for more than a decade to win a pathway to dignified wages and benefits — and true economic, racial and gender equality. Before Prop A became the law of the land, 1 in 3 workers in our state received zero paid sick days. I’m angry that some legislators are trying to attack our hard-won right to show up for ourselves and our families.
I’d hate for our politicians to rip that right out of our hands. We worked too hard to get here.
We appreciate the lawmakers who are standing in solidarity with Missouri workers by trying to block House Bill 567 from advancing. As the legislative session comes to a close, we urge all our elected officials to follow suit, and think about people like me who make billions of dollars for fast food corporations but are barely scraping by when it comes to taking care of ourselves and our families.
My kids deserve a brighter future, and it takes all of us coming together to make that possible.