More than 500 Missouri businesses are rallying for Proposition A, pushing for a $15 per hour minimum wage and paid sick leave by 2026.
Backed by the group Missouri Business for a Healthy Economy, Proposition A plans to raise the minimum wage to $13.75 an hour next year and $15 by 2026, with additional annual cost-of-living adjustments. Tipped workers must earn at least half the minimum rate, plus tips.
Andi Montee, owner of the Mokaska Coffee Shop in St. Joseph, believes the wage increase would enhance Missouri's appeal.
"Having that standard and that security is just really important for people to look at Missouri for one as a place where they could live, where they could stay," Montee asserted. "Especially for young people who often times want to kind of move outside of the places they might have grown up in."
Not everyone is on board with the increase. Business groups like the Missouri Chamber of Commerce warned higher wages and required paid sick leave could increase costs, leading some businesses to cut staff, reduce hours or raise prices.
Despite the concerns, Missouri's minimum wage keeps rising, set at $12 in 2023 and adjusted to $12.30 in 2024. Montee believes higher wages for employees benefit employers as well.
"We will fight tooth and nail to keep our staff kind of working there, because training somebody is difficult, it costs money and it has all kinds of things that pop up in the long term," Montee outlined. "We feel pretty strongly that having that higher minimum wage is really a mutually beneficial thing."
Still, critics of the increase do not believe employers will benefit at all, contending it could harm young and entry-level workers, who might see fewer job openings as businesses face rising costs.
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Whether it's pressure from inflation or health-care costs eating away at savings, a reliable "nest-egg" is still up in the air for many Americans. There are calls to bring more certainty and retirement simplicity to the table for workers. Pensions offered to public employees are seen as more stable because they're not shaken by movements in the financial markets. In recent polling from the National Institute on Retirement Security, 86% of Americans say all workers, including the private sector, should have a retirement plan that is more pension-driven.
Dan Doonan, executive director of National Institute on Retirement Security, says retirement coverage is still too spotty for non-wealthy workers, leaving them on their own to put away savings.
"In general, we're just asking way too much of individuals to get all this right. And saving during the middle years of your life to provide income throughout retirement, it really is a challenging endeavor," he explained.
He added the good news is that more states, including Minnesota, are setting up programs that enroll private-sector workers in an IRA style plan. The goal is to step in when a company can't or won't offer retirement perks. Experts say they're easy for states to operate and benefit small businesses because they don't have to contribute. But for the workers, the IRAs typically have lower contribution limits, meaning the retirement savings might not stretch as far.
Just like state and local governments, Doonan said a more simplified network of retirement programs around the country can help companies in the private sector avoid staff turnover.
"As they do move in that direction, I think what you'll see is more loyalty in return to the company. So, there are some benefits for private employers, especially employers who value retention," he continued.
Congress has taken its own steps by adopting policies such as the Secure 2.0 Act, which updates federal rules dealing with retirement plans in hopes of boosting access. Doonan said those reforms could steer more people toward savings accounts similar to pensions. But he warns rising health-care costs for older populations still could put a damper on things. And partisan divides remain in Congress over the future of Social Security.
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A recent round of employee cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency and other efforts by President Donald Trump's administration to follow through on the president's campaign promise to reduce the size of the federal government have prompted concern among government employees.
In Iowa, the cuts will have an effect on a number of employees.
Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO, said the cuts or job reclassifications threaten veterans' services employees, civil servants who work at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, just across Iowa's western border, programs that help people access Social Security benefits, or work in government security jobs in Des Moines. He said all the moves are not being made based on facts.
"Beyond that, it's a real problem to transform the professional civil service into an army of political appointees that are just loyal to one person and not to the mission to the American public or to what their job is actually supposed to be," asserted,
The American Federation of Government Employees marched in Washington, D.C., on Monday to rally against, among a host of measures, House Resolution 201, which would recalculate the way federal agencies evaluate employee performance and calculate their pay. The administration said it is making good on President Trump's campaign pledge to reduce the size of the federal government.
Wishman acknowledged while the looming job cuts across Iowa and the country create uncertainty among government employees, there is a bright spot.
"People understand that the way for them to fight back is collectively," emphasized. "AFGE has seen their numbers of new members jump by thousands since the president got his pen out and started writing executive orders, some of which aren't even legal."
A federal judge late last week ordered a temporary hold on Trump's order to effectively dismantle
the U.S. Agency for International Development, saying the affected employees would suffer "irreparable harm" from layoffs with no notice.
Disclosure: The Iowa Federation of Labor contributes to our fund for reporting on Environmental Justice, Livable Wages/Working Families, Social Justice, and Urban Planning/Transportation. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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By Nina B. Elkadi for Sentient.
Broadcast version by Judith Ruiz-Branch for Illinois News Connection reporting for the Sentient-Public News Service Collaboration
Eighty-one percent of evaluated poultry workers were found to be at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, a new study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture says. This risk is primarily driven by high piece rates, which is the number of animals or pieces of meat handled by each slaughterhouse worker. Nearly half of pork processing workers evaluated were also at high risk for injury.
On January 10, the department released the results of two studies, one on poultry workers and one on processed pork workers, that looked at the impact of line speed and workloads on worker health. The studies showed that piece rate was an important metric in determining workplace safety. While line speed is important, the number of people working on each line combined with line speed provides a more comprehensive risk analysis. Among surveyed poultry workers, 40 percent reported moderate to severe pain in the last year. Most did not report that pain to supervisors.
“These USDA studies reaffirm what we have long known – that poultry and swine slaughter poses serious risk to workers, regardless of line speed. We must take stronger action to protect these workers and ensure the safety of our food supply chain,” United Food and Commercial Workers International Union president Marc Perrone wrote in a press release.
According to United Nations FAO estimates, each day 206 million chickens and 4 million pigs are killed for food. The vast majority are raised on factory farms and killed and processed in meatpacking plants, where risks to workers such as amputation and severe falls are common.
The studies’ authors recommend lowering piece rates by increasing staffing, adapting workstations for better ergonomic practices and improving medical management within workplaces. According to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, poultry and meat companies remain among the most dangerous to work for, in large-part due to injuries from keeping up with fast line speeds.
“Since the first term of Trump’s administration the problem of increasing the line speed and the decrease of the workforce have become some of the most important issues workers have been struggling with every day,” Magaly Licolli, executive director of Venceremos, an Arkansas-based poultry-worker advocacy group, wrote to Sentient.
“The findings of the reports are alarming, but not surprising to us because we’ve seen how for the past years, the industry has been putting workers’ health and safety at risk for the sake of their own profits,” wrote Licolli, who also called on the USDA and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to pass standards to prevent increasing line speed.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used federal legislation to declare meatpacking facilities essential, forcing workers to spend hours inside of buildings that would become hotspots for the virus. The Trump administration also granted poultry plants the ability to increase line speed, which some groups, like the Food Integrity Campaign, have been working to reverse through litigation. The studies released last week were a result of these lawsuits and pushback. During the height of the pandemic, as many as 269 meatpacking employees died and 59,000 workers tested positive for the virus.
“Industrial animal agriculture operates on a model of systemic exploitation to increase their profit margins at the expense of the well-being of animals, workers and rural communities. Today’s USDA studies on swine and poultry processing workers clearly show the human cost: life-altering injuries, painful work conditions and high risks tied to relentless production speeds and piece-rate pay structures,” Jessica Culpepper, executive director of FarmSTAND, a legal advocacy group, wrote to Sentient. “The incoming administration’s history of deregulating Big Ag and advancing policies that strip protections from vulnerable workers will only deepen these injustices.”
Nina B. Elkadi wrote this article for Sentient.
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