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Group abandons minimum wage ballot measure hours before judge rules against it [1]

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Date: 2024-08-08

A judge ruled that a citizen-led initiative to increase Arizona’s minimum wage did not gather enough signatures to make the November ballot, just hours after the backers of the measure announced they would abandon their effort to put the issue to voters.

Facing a likely defeat in a lawsuit aiming to keep voters from raising Arizona’s minimum wage to $18 an hour, the political action committee that spearheaded the initiative said Thursday morning that it wanted to voluntarily pull the measure from the November ballot.

Later the same day Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney confirmed the campaign’s fears and ruled that it had not gathered enough signatures, the Arizona Republic reported.

In the announcement Thursday morning, the Raise the Wage AZ campaign said that it intended to withdraw the more than 350,000 voter signatures it had gathered to get its measure on the November ballot. Instead, the political committee said, it would focus its efforts on raising the minimum wage at the state legislature in 2025.

Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, the national organization behind Raise the Wage AZ, which has worked toward increasing the minimum wage in several states across the country, told the Arizona Mirror in a written statement Thursday afternoon that the campaign wants to spike the ballot measure preemptively because it does not believe the signatures it filed will withstand a legal challenge brought by Arizona restaurants.

“We expect that after litigation and challenges from the (Arizona Restaurant Association) we will likely not have enough signatures to meet the qualification threshold,” Jayaraman told the Mirror in a written statement. “The effort, resources and time required to litigate lead us to believe our resources are best directed towards fighting against the measure being pushed by the restaurant association and to work on building the grassroots effort for city-level measures and a statewide bill.”

But a the campaign did not have the option to simply say it no longer wants its measure on the ballot at this point in the process. Arizona Secretary of State’s Office spokesman Aaron Thacker told the Mirror that there was no way to withdraw the hundreds of thousands of signatures that the campaign filed last month — and that were in the process of being verified by county elections officials. He said it would take an order from a judge before the office could take any action.

“For us, it’s just rumor and speculation until we get a court order,” Thacker said.

Another spokesperson for the SOS told the Arizona Republic Thursday afternoon that following Blaney’s order, the office would cease verification of signatures for the ballot measure.

Raise the Wage AZ had been gathering voter signatures for its ballot measure, dubbed the “One Fair Wage Act” since November 2022. On July 3, the campaign filed 354,278 signatures with the Secretary of State’s Office, about 100,000 more than the 255,949 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

Last month, the Arizona Restaurant Association filed a lawsuit claiming that Raise the Wage made numerous errors in its signature collections, and was tens of thousands of signatures short of the number needed to make the ballot.

Opponents of voter-led ballot initiatives in Arizona can challenge the signatures they collected in court and get them disqualified for various reasons, including if the signature-gatherer fails to get all of the signers information, if the person who signed isn’t a registered voter or if the signature is illegible.

Campaigns typically aim to gather significantly more signatures than the ballot threshold because they know that some signatures will inevitably be thrown out. In this case, Raise the Wage just didn’t have enough of a buffer to offset the number of signatures it expects to be disqualified, Jayaraman said in the statement.

“We got info back from our legal team about the validity rate we’d need to hit and legal costs to continue,” she said. “Which led us to the decision — we felt it would be more strategic to save those resources and invest money in a winning strategy.”

If approved by voters, the ballot measure would have increased the state’s minimum wage from $14.35 to $18 per hour, with increases every year for inflation, and incrementally lower the amount of a worker’s tips restaurants and bars could use to reconcile their wages with the state minimum. Eventually, employers would have to pay all workers the state minimum wage, regardless of whether they receive tips.

The Arizona Restaurant Association is backing a competing measure, dubbed the “Tipped Workers Protection Act,” which Republican lawmakers sent to the November ballot.

Earlier this week a judge dismissed Raise the Wage’s challenge to that measure, which would allow employers to pay tipped workers 25% less than minimum wage as long as they make at least $2 per hour more than the minimum wage with tips included.

In the suit, Raise the Wage claimed that the short title of Proposition 138, the “Tipped Workers Protection Act,” would mislead voters, claiming that the proposition would actually make things worse for tipped employees.

But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson did not agree, dismissing the challenge in an Aug. 6 ruling.

The Arizona Restaurant Association celebrated One Fair Wage’s failure in a Thursday statement.

“The One Fair Wage initiative has always been a front for union bosses and out-of-state activists,” Steve Chucri, its president and CEO, said in the statement. “The radicals who want to force a new pay structure down the throats of Arizona small businesses and tipped workers were never honest about their true motivations, so I’m not surprised they also lied about their number of signature petitions for the ballot.”

In the statement, the restaurant trade group urged voters to support Prop. 138 in November, which it called “voters’ only chance to protect tipped workers and small businesses.”

“Without passage of Prop 138, you can bet the imposters behind One Fair Wage will be back with a future attempts (sic) to install a California-style pay system in Arizona,” Chucri said. “That means lower tips for workers, lost jobs for employers and higher costs for everyone. Passage of Prop 138 is the first step to prevent that from happening.”

In its press statement, One Fair Wage said it had plans to work with Democratic Arizona Rep. Mariana Sandoval, of Goodyear, to introduce legislation with the same intent as its ballot measure.

The campaign said it will work with UNIDOS, a Latino civil rights advocacy organization, to engage with voters and low wage workers to support candidates and election officials who support Sandoval’s bill and to collect signatures to put the same initiative on ballots at the city and county level next spring.

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[1] Url: https://azmirror.com/2024/08/08/group-wants-to-abandon-minimum-wage-ballot-measure-amid-legal-challenge/

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