Phyllis Jackson is paid $7.25 an hour, plus tips, pushing wheelchair-bound passengers between terminals at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. She wouldn’t have been demonstrating for more money Thursday outside West Atlanta fast-food joints if city officials had successfully raised the minimum wage a decade ago.
Back then the Atlanta City Council mandated that comapanies doing business with the city must pay workers at least $10.50 an hour, with annual inflation-adjusted raises. But state legislators, lobbied hard by Atlanta companies, passed legislation prohibiting local governments from setting their own minimum wages.
Jackson joined dozens of low-wage protestors to demand employers pay $15 an hour. Organizers said the “Fight for $15” protests unfolded in more than 150 cities nationwide and highlighted the growth of the higher-wage movement.
Cities and states across the country increasingly support raising the minimum wage, as does President Obama. Exit polling last month showed most Georgians agree.
Georgia Reps. Tyrone Brooks of Atlanta and Dewey McClain of Lawrenceville, both Democrats, have already introduced a bill (HB 8) to raise the state’s $5.15 an hour minimum wage — which is one of the nation’s lowest and applies to relatively few workers exempt from the federal wage — to as much as $15 an hour. They hope to amend their bill in January to restore the rights of Atlanta and other local governments to raise wages on their own.
The Republican-dominated legislature will likely kill HB 8, as they have similar bills in the past. Conservatives say mandated wage increases hurt job creation and the economy.
“Politicians need to come out and do the job that we do for $7.25,” said Jackson, 68, as Thursday’s lunchtime rally outside a KFC chicken restaurant ebbed. “Let’s see how they feel. Let’s see if they could pay their bills, buy insurance for their families and afford day care for their children on $7.25 an hour.”
A living wage
In October 2001, the Atlanta Living Wage Coalition rallied outside City Hall to pressure mayoral candidate Shirley Franklin and others to require businesses that receive city grants, loans, leases or contracts to pay $10.50 an hour. Roughly 10,000 workers at the airport alone would’ve benefited.
Franklin and most city council members were on board. At a May 2003 hearing, though, Delta, AirTran and the Georgia Restaurant Association testified against the measure.
“One of the lobbyists for one of the companies said, ‘If Atlanta passes this bill we’re going to go the state and stop it,’ ” recalled Fred Brooks, an associate professor of social work at Georgia State University.
The following March, the newly Republican General Assembly barred local governments from requiring a minimum wage higher than the federal standard, which was then $5.15.
“We innocently thought if we get elected leaders to pass this bill it would stand. We had no idea what was coming,” said Cindia Cameron, who ran the Atlanta chapter of 9to5, an advocacy organization that led the fight.
The city tried a new law giving a preference to companies bidding for city work if they paid at least $10.50 an hour. Most airport contractors would be exempted. The General Assembly again shot it down.
“The marketplace is what will determine what wages will be paid, ” Sen. Seth Harp (R-Midland) said at the time.
Critics say GOP legislators, who usually espouse a local-government-knows-best philosophy, behaved hypocritically.
“It seems a little counter-intuitive for Republican legislators at the state level, who don’t like government at too far of a distance from the people, to tell cities what they can and can’t do,” Cameron said.
Former state Sen. Perry McGuire, a Republican from Douglasville who served 1993-96, said GOP legislators were simply “blocking bad policy.”
“Pre-emption was a protective measure for all businesses in the city and outside the city,” said McGuire, a restaurant association board member. The votes were “very consistent with Georgia’s pro-business, supply-and-demand mentality.”
Eleven other states have preempted local wage-increase laws, but only a few have also outlawed suggested wages for contract workers.
“Georgia has one of the more stringent laws in the nation,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, an attorney at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group. “It’s very unfortunate because cities are trying to take action to come up with a wage that better reflects the high cost of living in that particular region.”
‘I’m going down’
Thursday’s demonstrations — at 6 a.m. protestors rallied outside a McDonald’s, at lunchtime they crossed Joseph E. Lowery Blvd. to protest alongside the KFC — marked the second anniversary of the wage-raise movement which started in New York City. Fast-food and home health-care workers were joined for the first time by airport and retail workers in Atlanta.
Tavaris Stanley, 24, walked off his job at a nearby Family Dollar store to protest the $7.75 an hour he makes stocking shelves.
“I really want my own place, my own car and to be able to afford just the little things and be happy,” Stanley said. “Everything is steadily going up — cigarettes, gas, phone bills — and me, I’m going down.”
The protests, at least nationwide, appear to be having an effect. The Chicago City Council earlier this week voted to gradually raise the city’s minimum wage to $13 by 2019. Chicago is the 20th U.S. city to take such action, joining Oakland ($12.25 by 2015), San Francisco and Seattle ($15 an hour by 2018).
Voters last month in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — all Republican-led states — also approved non-binding referenda calling for a rise to as much as $9.75 an hour. An exit poll during last month’s election showed 57 percent of Georgia voters support raising the minimum wage.
The following day, though, Gov. Nathan Deal said a minimum wage boost would not “show up on our legislative agenda.” Rep. Brooks said the key to swaying reluctant legislators is a vocal, grassroots push by low-wage workers across Georgia.
“There will be a lot of support when you explain that the minimum wage will lift people out of poverty, reduce welfare roles and keep families intact,” Brooks said.
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