Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Minimum wage petitions garner 80,000 signatures

Measure would raise compensation from $5.15 to $6.15 per hour

A coalition of worker rights advocates and Democrats filed about 80,000 signatures Monday seeking to raise the state's minimum wage by $1 an hour.

D. Taylor, president of the Culinary Local 226, said anyone who opposes raising the minimum wage to $6.15 from $5.15 should walk a day in a low-class worker's shoes.

"After you go and work for the minimum wage, you'll be the first to vote yes," Taylor said at a rally attended by about 100 people outside the county Election Department offices in North Las Vegas, where the Clark signatures were submitted.

Billy Rogers, president of the Southwest Group, which collected the signatures, said petitions were submitted in every county but Esmeralda. He believes the petitions qualify with 10 percent of the electorate in 14 of the counties. The petition must have 10 percent in 13 of 17 counties, a minimum of 51,337 signatures, to qualify for November's general election ballot.

The rally drew Democratic candidates for office and a high-ranking surrogate from Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Antonio Villaraigosa, co-chair of Kerry's national campaign and a current Los Angeles city councilman, said Kerry supports raising the minimum wage in Nevada.

"In America, we value work and the people who work for a living," Villaraigosa, the former Speaker of the California Assembly, said.

In an interview Villaraigosa said raising the minimum wage would give more Americans the means to become middle class.

At the news conference, Leticia Valencia, speaking Spanish, told the crowd she is a mother of three and has worked for minimum wage picking fruit in California and in manufacturing in Nevada.

"This isn't enough," she said.

If approved by voters this year and again in 2006, the measure would increase the pay for minimum wage workers by $2,000 a year.

The measure will effect 51,000 families, according to members of the Coalition to Give Nevadans a Raise.

The initiative petition seeks to amend the constitution to raise the minimum wage to $6.15 only for companies that don't offer health insurance benefits to their employees and dependents. Employees younger than 18 would be exempt from the increase.

If the measure passes in both years and takes effect in 2007, a cost-of-living increase would trigger in 2008.

The minimum wage would increase each year to an amount equal to the increase in the Consumer Price Index, capped at 3 percent in any year, unless Congress raised the federal minimum wage.

The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the initiative, thinks that creates an unwarranted compliance burden for businesses and makes planning difficult.

"Our preference, in terms of increasing wages, is in development of higher-tech jobs and diversifying the economy rather than dictating what our state constitution should be," said Christina Dugan, the chamber's director of government affairs.

Al Barber, owner of TBL Construction, said opponents who might argue raising the minimum wage would cost jobs are misguided.

"Raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, period," Barber said.

State Sen. Sandra Tiffany, R-Henderson, said that as a small-business owner, she is opposed to government mandates on her business.

"I do not support being forced to make decisions by a special interest like labor unions," Tiffany said.