By Mindy Ragan Wood
Southwest Ledger
OKLAHOMA CITY – Petitioners urged the Oklahoma Supreme Court to let voters decide to raise minimum wage, and not the courts, during a hearing Wednesday.
Following repeated failed attempts by some lawmakers to increase the minimum wage, proponents Kelsey Cobbs and Dustin Phelan filed an initiative petition to raise the minimum wage by a vote of the public. The State Chamber and Oklahoma Farm Bureau filed legal action to challenge it.
If the petition – State Question 832 – is approved by voters, workers would be paid $15 an hour by 2029 and afterward, the minimum would be set according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s inflation calculation.
Critics have said that if the federal agency is allowed to determine the state’s minimum wage beginning in 2030, it bypasses the Legislature, which is a violation of the Oklahoma Constitution.
Justices wrestled with whether they should allow the public to vote on SQ 832 or if they should first rule on objections to its constitutionality. Some justices commented that the high court does not intervene on such arguments before a proposed state law is adopted.
Attorneys for the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office and for the State Chamber argued that the court has the authority to strike the petition before Oklahomans have a chance to sign it if it is blatantly unconstitutional.
Justice James E. Edmondson questioned if they should let the Legislature overturn the federal agency ties in the petition after it becomes law.
“Why should we decide when the Legislature can veto it?” he asked.
Edmondson also added that while the Legislature hasn’t raised minimum wage, it could address it during its next session in February.
Justices listened to arguments that the court could strike language from the petition via a severability clause – the portion of the petition that allows the federal agency to set the wage after 2029. Attorneys for the petition claimed that the court could then keep the provision that set the wage through 2029.
Mithun Mansinghani, attorney for the chamber, argued that the court would be acting outside its authority to amend any initiative petition.
“It’s not a road this court should go down,” Mansinghani said. He urged the court to strike the petition and allow proponents to refile a new, constitutionally sound state question.
Justices considered the second claim that the petition’s gist – a summary of the state question – was misleading. The gist appears at the top of each signature page, but Mansinghani claimed because it was deceptive, the court should strike the petition.
The gist states the minimum wage increase would not apply to federal workers, but that exemption already exists. Mansinghani argued omitting the exemption would mislead the public to believe SQ 832 would also boost wages for federal employees.
Justice Noma Gurich asked the attorney for the petition, Melanie Rughani, why she included the mention that the law would not apply to federal workers.
Rughani said it would have been misleading to leave the federal exemption out because it could lead workers to believe their wages would be increased had it been left out. She also said nothing stated in the gist was false.
The purpose of a gist, “is to prevent fraud” while the petition is being circulated for signatures, not to define every detail of the state question voters will be asked to adopt, Rughani said.
Following the hearing, spokesperson for Raise the Wage Oklahoma, Amber England said the challenge to defeat the petition is politically motivated “to block voters from being able to decide this issue.
“We’re here today fighting for Oklahoma families who are working full-time jobs and struggling to get by because the cost of gas and groceries keep going up, but wages have largely stayed the same,” England said.
State Chamber President Chad Warmington denied the accusation of playing politics, saying that the challenge to the petition is simply a legal one.
He also said the petition “is a solution looking for a problem” because of the labor shortage. Oklahoma has just 52 workers for every 100 jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Warmington said fewer workers means employers are paying higher wages to attract and retain them. Calculating minimum wage with consideration of the cost of goods that are much higher in other states like New York and California would harm the Oklahoma economy, he said.
“And that's why we think Oklahoma has a very strong tradition of not delegating authority away,” Warmington said. “We’d like to see the court keep it that way.”
Mindy Ragan Wood | Southwest Ledger
State Chamber President and CEO Chad Warmington speaks to reporters Wednesday following an Oklahoma Supreme Court hearing on a legal challenge to SQ 832 to raise minimum wage.