Jason Delgado
One of the nation’s largest employee unions infused six figures into the Florida For A Fair Wage campaign this summer, notably accounting for roughly 94% of the campaign’s summer earnings.
According to campaign finance records, Florida For A Fair Wage collected $191,161 since May. Of that, $181,250 came in two separate same-day contributions from the Service Employees International Union in June. Without it, the campaign bankrolled just shy of $10,000, coming mostly from small contributions by individuals across the state.
The campaign currently holds $123,399 in the bank and has received more than $5 million in contributions since October 2017.
Florida For A Fair Wage is a statewide campaign promoting Amendment 2 to incrementally increase Florida’s minimum wage to $15 an hour.
The amendment, spearheaded by prominent lawyer John Morgan, seeks to raise Florida’s minimum wage to $10 per hour in 2021 and then incrementally to $15 per hour by 2026. Thereafter, the state’s minimum wage would increase with the rate of inflation as required by the Florida Constitution.
Florida’s current minimum wage is $8.56, which equates to a full-time annual income of $17,600 per year.
“Amendment 2 would lift pay for hundreds of thousands of Floridians and reverse decades of growing pay inequality,” the campaign’s website claims. “It allows individuals to take pride in their work rather than fight the endless cycle of poverty.”
Service Employees International Union has more than 2 million members. The group fights to increase dignity and worth among workers and the services they provide and is dedicated to improving the lives of workers and their families and creating a more just and humane society, the unions bio describes.
Amendment 2 is among 29 other initiatives that will require a supermajority vote of 60% in order to pass.
In May, a survey of registered voters by St. Pete Polls showed nearly 64% support a constitutional amendment lifting the minimum wage as prescribed in the amendment.
2 comments
Jaime
August 10, 2020 at 5:02 pm
A “fair wage” is what a willing employer and a person seeking employment can agree upon. It is not a political euphemism like John Morgan, George Soros, and others of their ilk attempt to make it.
A critical element of it is the level of skill that a prospective employee can bring to a job. If he/she has no skills the person has no basis to claim an “entitlement” to a specified dollar amount. However, if the employer sees potential, it may be willing to pay a higher hourly wage as long as the employee progresses.
If this sounds as though the “chips” are in the hands of the employer, it should because they are. It is in the employer’s best interest to hire the best-equipped people for its business so it will prosper. The business does not exist for the benefit of the employees, but when the business does prosper, so do the employees. If employees feel that they are not being treated fairly or paid enough they are free to sell their skills to someone else.
Betsy Marville
August 11, 2020 at 12:14 pm
The bottom line is that minimum wage, when compared to the level it was in 1960 and adjusting up for inflation, should be about $22/hour. There is no state in America where a person can work a full time minimum wage job and afford even the most modest apartment. The current minimum wage is keeping people from being able to work themselves out of poverty. Their poverty affects all of us because the government must provide services such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and all the things that hard working people could buy themselves if the wage reflected the cost of living.
Don’t look to the multinational corporate giants who are making windfall profits with CEO salaries some 400 times the rate of their employees’wages to set the rules. They have moved every job they can to China or any country that has slave wages and no labor protection laws. Corporate greed currently is the law of America.
Workers are asking for a barely livable share in the profit that they make for their employers. Let’s not condemn ourselves to be like the slave-labor countries and work toward a fair chance at the American Dream for everyone who is trying to achieve it.
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