A voter-mandated pay hike for Missouri’s minimum wage workers hasn’t kicked in yet — and conservative lawmakers and business groups are looking to the General Assembly and the courts to block the raise.
State legislators have filed three bills to restrict the provisions of Proposition A, which ordered a boost to the minimum wage and required employers to give workers paid sick leave.
Meanwhile, Missouri business groups filed a petition in December with the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn Proposition A.
The business groups argue that Proposition A violates the Missouri Constitution by including multiple subjects — wages plus sick leave — in a single ballot measure.
Labor groups speak confidently about fending off court challenges, and they bristle at efforts to reverse voters’ decision in November by the legislature in the spring.
“It’s a tremendous message of disrespect to the nearly 1.7 million Missourians who voted in support of Proposition A,” said Richard Von Glahn, the campaign manager with Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages that led the Proposition A campaign.
Employment and constitutional law experts say the lawsuit does not have strong legs.
“Nothing’s perfect, so if we allowed these kinds of challenges after an election we’d never settle any of these issues and we’d just have to keep redoing them over and over again,” said Allen Rostron, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
The fate of Proposition A within the Missouri legislature, however, remains another question.
Businesses balk at mandated Missouri minimum wage rates and sick leave
Missouri business owners say Proposition A will push up their costs and possibly force them to cut their workforces to afford the higher rates. That could mean replacing more people with kiosks and other technology.
Still, Ray McCarty, president and CEO of Associated Industries of Missouri, said that employers have come to expect minimum wage increases. Their real problem lies with the paid sick leave mandate. His organization is one of the plaintiffs challenging the forced pay raises and sick leave in court.
“You have to make sure you have sufficient staff to provide the services that you’re supposed to provide,” he said. “It makes it harder on everyone if someone is supposed to work and they call in sick.”
Proposition A lets workers sue employers over sick leave disputes, potentially resulting in criminal penalties and compensatory damages. It also bans employers from asking employees why they are calling in sick or requiring a doctor’s note unless the absence exceeds three consecutive days. McCarty said that those rules could lead to abuse of sick leave policies.
“If you don’t have the ability as an employer to control a problem employee that may continually call in sick,” he said, “then that’s an issue.”
Von Glahn said employers don’t have to tell their workers why they take time off, and workers deserve the same dignity.
“It’s not the employer’s business if someone needs to take a mental health day or needs time to visit with someone about depression or substance abuse or domestic violence,” he said. “Workers are not children that need to be managed by a responsible parent. They know what they need.”
While many Missouri business owners are concerned about their costs ballooning, some support the changes.
Mike Draper is the owner of Raygun Clothing, which has six stores employing 105 people in Kansas City; Des Moines, Iowa; Chicago; and Omaha and Lincoln in Nebraska.
Draper is a member of Missouri Business for a Healthy Economy, a coalition of over 500 business owners who support Proposition A.
He said that he doesn’t always support regulations on small businesses, but he doesn’t see this as a business-versus-worker issue. He said that if the minimum wage isn’t increasing with inflation, it can harm the economy.
Raygun’s employees already make $15.50 per hour as a starting wage, but he wants to see all hourly employees earn more and carry more spending power to boost local economies.
“They should want as many people as possible to have money to use that’s not just for survival,” he said.
Missourians for Healthy Families estimates that an increased minimum wage could put $600 million in the pockets of Missouri consumers.
As a clothing retailer, Draper said the industry relies on people having disposable income to spend on nonessential items like his products.
“There’s only so many T-shirts Elon Musk can wear at a time,” he said. “So anything you can do to spread money to as many people as possible is going to be good in the long run.”
What are the grounds for the lawsuit?
The business coalition is challenging Proposition A on four key grounds.
The first argument focuses on Missouri’s single-subject rule. Missouri is one of 16 states requiring ballot initiatives to address only a single topic. Opponents of Proposition A argue that it combines unrelated provisions — minimum wage and paid sick leave — into one question, violating that constitutional requirement.
Proposition A will raise the state’s minimum wage to $13.75 by Jan. 1 and $15 per hour by 2026. It also mandates that employers provide workers with one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked by May 1, 2025.
“Our argument is that people were not given the opportunity to approve just one or the other,” McCarty said.
The lawsuit also claims that the ballot summary failed to disclose all the provisions included in the measure, such as paid domestic violence leave. The detailed initiative plan allows employees to use paid sick time for care or shelter related to domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.
“We’re not saying that that’s a bad thing,” McCarty said. “We’re saying that voters should have been given the opportunity to choose if that’s what they wanted to support or no.”
Von Glahn argues that minimum wage and paid sick leave fall under the single subject of paid compensation.
He also defended the ballot summary and said that the secretary of state is required to condense ballot measures into a 100-word summary. That inevitably leaves out details.
“To suggest now that the secretary of state and the state auditor, neither of whom supported the initiative, wrote inaccurate statements is just an … argument that shouldn’t carry any water,” he said. “Voters clearly understood that this was about raising the minimum wage and workers earning paid time off to take care of themselves or their families in a time of need.”
The lawsuit also argues that the fiscal note, which estimates the measure’s financial impact on state and local governments, was misleading and insufficient. The fiscal note projects one-time state government costs of up to $53,000 and annual costs of at least $256,000 by 2027. It also notes that state and local tax revenues could fluctuate depending on how businesses respond.
McCarty said the fiscal note failed to adequately reflect the financial impact on local governments. At least one local government has expressed concern that the proposition could increase hiring costs, he said.
Von Glahn said that the fiscal note and ballot summary were publicly available before the election. He questioned why business groups waited until after the measure passed to file objections.
“Six hundred and fifty days and not once did they raise a complaint about it until voters overwhelmingly passed this,” he said. “There was a process for them to do that.”
Lastly, the lawsuit alleges that Proposition A discriminates because it exempts certain groups, such as government employees, school districts, and retail or service employers grossing less than $500,000 annually, from complying with the minimum wage increase or paid sick leave requirements.
“This is not frivolous, but it’s not a great claim either,” said Marcia McCormick, employment law professor at St. Louis University.
She said the single-subject argument has the most merit to it, but that ruling could go either way.
Courts have consistently ruled that compensation includes benefits related to work for which an employee is paid, McCormick said. She also pointed out that the definition of what constitutes a single subject is fairly broad, but as long as the provisions relate to one general purpose, they are likely to be considered a single subject.
She said the fiscal note is an even weaker argument. In Missouri, any citizen wishing to challenge the official ballot title or the fiscal note prepared for an initiative petition must file an action in the Cole County Circuit Court within 10 days after the official ballot title is certified by the secretary of state, meaning this challenge is already past its bedtime.
“You can’t challenge them once the election is over,” McCormick said.
Experts also agree that the argument against the legislative summary isn’t strong.
Rostron with UMKC said that courts don’t expect a summary to encapsulate every detail in a proposition.
“They can’t put the whole language on the ballot or people are never going to read it,” he said.
The argument about exemptions for certain employees is also unlikely to succeed because states have broad discretion to determine whom a law applies to as long as it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race or gender. Other types of distinctions — such as those based on age, physical or mental ability, or occupation — receive minimal scrutiny under the law.
“All kinds of laws pay different categories of businesses or workers differently,” Rostron said. “The legislature could decide that they’re going to subsidize corn farmers but not wheat farmers and you might say that’s discriminatory. But so what? Laws discriminating on these kinds of basis are just never struck down.”
Legislative moves
Missouri lawmakers have moved to reverse voter-backed action before, notably in undoing ethics legislation approved by voters in 2018 and the measure that expanded Medicaid coverage in the state, approved by voters in 2020. Legislators are trying to restrict the scope of Amendment 3, approved by voters on Nov. 5, which enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution.
“This is a political matter and there’s a remedy throughout the political process,” Rostron said. “If the business associations want to gather enough signatures, campaign for it and put it on the ballot, then they could go to the trouble of doing that.”
In December, lawmakers introduced bills that would exempt certain businesses from Proposition A’s provisions, delay certain minimum wage increases and modify paid sick leave hours or delay the implementation of paid sick leave for certain employees.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
