The Secretary of State’s office today announced that the initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage over the next few years to $12 per hour. If passed, the minimum wage would increase immediately to $9.30 per hour, and go up 90 cents per hour each year, until hitting $12 per hour, which would happen in 2020 (after which this year’s ballot initiative supporters would start another campaign to raise the minimum wage).
Organizers claimed to have submitted 200,000 signatures for verification, but a spokesman for the Secretary of State said that the office received 189,419 signatures. The validity rate was a low 57%, and it appears that there were some forged signatures in the five percent sample that the Secretary of State’s office used in its calculation.
But this useless measure will be on the ballot this fall, and if passed, we expect it to crowd out younger workers, unskilled workers, and many others on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. But it should be a boon to union coffers.