Eighty three counties, 275 cities and 1,240 townships all work in harmony to create the diverse state of Michigan. Each of these areas comes with its own unique community, differing widely in not only opinions and culture, but also the factors critical to the economic needs of a population. Cost of living, average income, racial demographics and so much more are vastly different from area to area within the state.
Recognizing this, it simply doesn’t make sense for policymakers in Lansing to treat the state as uniform when writing and implementing laws. Yet, in the cases of the minimum wage and others, legislators ignore this nuance — to the detriment of more effective local policy campaigns.
The state of Michigan has numerous preemption laws that restrict local governments from legislating on a variety of issues, vesting this power solely in the hands of the state government. While proponents of preemption support that this standard creates uniformity and avoids a “patchwork” of laws, uniformity is not what the state needs — and a “patchwork” more realistically addresses the diversity of needs within Michigan.
There are numerous examples of the legal uniformity put in place by preemption laws hurting Michigan’s communities.
In one such example, House Bill 105 of 2015, the Local Government Labor Regulatory Limitation Act bars local governments from legislating on issues related to labor rights. This included scheduling, leave time and, most importantly, the minimum wage.
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