The Alabama legislature has voted to nullify a law passed last year in Birmingham that would have set the city’s minimum wage at $10.10 by mid-2017.
There is no denying the racist overtones in the vote. All of the yes votes were by white legislators, including 23 senators and 71 representatives. (All but one of those voting in favor were Republicans.) The white governor of Alabama, Robert J. Bentley, signed the bill within an hour of its final passage on Thursday.
Nearly 75 percent of the population of Birmingham is African-American.
Alabama is one of five states that have no state minimum wage. The others are Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. The lack of state wage floors is, in itself, a vestige of slavery in that it implicitly condones poverty-level wages. Employers in states without a minimum wage generally have to pay workers at least the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. But if there were no federal minimum, they would be able to pay the lowest amount they could get away with. Alabama legislators have justified their vote to preempt local minimum wages by saying that statewide uniformity regarding wage policy is more important than local democracy. That would be a weak argument in any case, but it is especially weak in Alabama, given that the state’s wage policy is effectively $0 an hour unless the feds impose a higher minimum.
It is unclear at this point what specific options Birmingham may exercise to fight back. What is clear is that the Alabama preemption law amounts to state-mandated wage suppression by an all-white majority of lawmakers against a majority black city.