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Supporters of a $15 minimum wage will rally Wednesday before the Minneapolis City Council considers whether to put the issue before voters this fall.
Members of the $15 for Minneapolis coalition, who gathered nearly 20,000 signatures on petitions supporting the measure, say they will file suit if the Council declines to place a city charter amendment on the November ballot. City Attorney Susan Segal is recommending against it.
“A lot of people in Minneapolis need $15,” said Rosheeda Credit, a member of Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and mother of five children who has never earned more than $11 an hour. “A lot of people want to vote on $15. As the people who are out here working, why can’t we have a say in how much we should be getting paid?”
Supporters say some 113,000 Minneapolis residents would benefit from an increase.
The City Council meets as Committee of the Whole Wednesday at 10 a.m. to review the city attorney’s opinion and draft language for a ballot measure, which calls for phasing in the $15 minimum wage between 2017 and 2020 for employers with 500 or more workers and between 2017 and 2022 for smaller employers. The draft language calls for the wage to be automatically adjusted each subsequent year to keep pace with inflation.
Members of the coalition, including 15 Now Minnesota; Neighborhoods Organizing for Change; CTUL, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha/Center of Workers United in Struggle; and several labor organizations said they will rally at City Hall prior to the council meeting. They object to Segal’s legal opinion that the ballot measure “is an ordinance disguised as a charter amendment” and is not permitted under the Minneapolis city charter.
The coalition’s legal team includes staff of the National Employment Law Project, a leading national non-profit labor law center; Karen Marty, former city attorney for many municipalities and expert in municipal law; Paul Lukas, civil litigator and partner at the Minneapolis employment and civil rights firm of Nichols/Kaster; and Bruce Nestor of the National Lawyers Guild, counsel in Berents v. City of Iowa City, in which citizens successfully established a police-civilian review board by charter amendment over objection of the city attorney and city council.
Segal’s opinion “flies in the face of decades of city practice,” the legal team said in a statement issued Tuesday. “In fact, Minneapolis’s current and past city charters have addressed a wide range of policy issues unrelated to the structure of city government – everything from regulating liquor sales to slaughterhouses to the sale of bread.
“It is a core municipal function of the city to protect the general welfare of city residents by ensuring that working people have a basic standard of living. The people of Minneapolis should not be denied the opportunity to enshrine that right to a minimum wage in the charter.”