LANSING, MI – As a court battle rolls on over whether to raise Michigan’s minimum wage to $12 an hour, the group behind that effort says it has enough support from voters to hike it even more.
One Fair Wage, the national nonprofit leading the effort, said it submitted over 610,000 petition signatures to the Secretary of State on Tuesday, July 26 for its Raise the Wage initiative. The proposed 2024 ballot measure would raise Michigan’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2027 and phase out a lower-than-minimum wage for tipped, disabled and youth workers.
Leaders said they broke the record for the most signatures ever submitted for a Michigan legislative petition.
“This is going to help hundreds of thousands of Michiganders get a raise that’s much needed,” said Raise the Wage co-chair Maricela Gutierrez.
The signature deadline for initiatives to appear on the November 2022 ballot was June 1, which Raise the Wage missed “out of an abundance of caution,” One Fair Wage president Saru Jayaraman said at the time, in the wake of a petition fraud scandal that cut the Republican governor’s race in half.
Signature gatherers had collected nearly 500,000, One Fair Wage said then, including nearly 460,000 by paid circulators.
“We’ve gone through a very rigorous process to try to validate every single signature that signed this petition,” co-chair Dave Woodward said Tuesday, adding that he feels “very confident” they will pass inspection.
The campaign had two validity firms check signatures,...
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