Drew Wilson
Orlando attorney John Morgan wants minimum wage workers to get a raise, and he’s putting cash on the line to help make that happen.
A new finance report filed by political committee Florida For A Fair Wage shows Morgan chipped in $373,259 last month across two checks from The Morgan Firm PA.
Morgan and his law firm account for all but $15 of the $979,655 the committee has raised since it was formed in late 2017. As of March 31, it had $19,370 in the bank.
Florida For A Fair Wage is sponsoring a ballot initiative that would raise Florida’s minimum wage to $10 an hour on Sept. 30, 2021 and increase by an additional $1 an hour each year, capping at $15 an hour on Sept. 30, 2026.
Florida voters overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment 15 years ago tying the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, a U.S. Department of Labor measure that tracks prince changes for things such as food, shelter, transportation and energy on a year-to-year basis.
Florida’s current minimum wage of $8.46 an hour represents a 21-cent increase over 2018’s minimum wage. That bump was the largest since 2012, when wages increased by 36 cents an hour.
Increases don’t come every year, however. There was a multi-year period of stagnation during and after the Great Recession.
To make the ballot Florida For A Fair Wage will need to collect 766,200 signatures from Florida voters. Florida Division of Elections records show it has collected about 10 percent of that total, which is enough to trigger a Florida Supreme Court review of the proposed ballot language.
The ballot summary: “Raises minimum wage to $10.00 per hour effective September 30th, 2021. Each September 30th thereafter, minimum wage shall increase by $1.00 per hour until the minimum wage reaches $15.00 per hour on September 30th, 2026. From that point forward, future minimum wage increases shall revert to being adjusted annually for inflation starting September 30th, 2027.”
Constitutional amendments require 60 percent support to pass.
Lawmakers are toying with raising that threshold to two-thirds, but that change would also need an okay from voters on the 2020 ballot, meaning that even if successful it would not apply to the wage initiative or any other 2020 proposals.
