In November 2024, 57% of Missouri voters cast their ballots in favor of Proposition A, which sought to raise the state’s minimum wage and expand access to paid sick leave. The new law is set to go into effect May 1. 

Since November, business groups have taken their concerns with the proposition to the state’s courts and legislature, arguing to the former that the ballot question was misleading and unconstitutional and to the latter that the proposition’s policies will harm small businesses and the state’s economy. 

The legal challenge against Prop A made its way to the Missouri Supreme Court, which recently finished hearing arguments for the case and will eventually release a decision. 

While both business and labor groups await that decision, an effort is underway in the Missouri General Assembly to roll back some provisions within the new law.

A legislative approach

That effort has been led by Rep. Sherri Gallick, a Belton Republican who filed House Bill 567, which keeps in place some parts of the law created by Prop A but removes others, including provisions relating to paid sick leave and future increases to the state’s minimum wage.

The bill passed the Missouri House in March by a vote of 96 to 51 and was sent to the Senate, where it was passed out of committee but was filibustered by Democrats once it came up for a vote on the floor.

Gallick, a retired businesswoman, said the law’s “one-size-fits-all” approach is especially hard on small businesses. 

“There’s no magic money,” she said. “Everything has a cost. Labor is one of the most intensive costs in most businesses.”

Gallick said she’s heard from businesses that the law could lead to layoffs, cutting hours or even closing.

Another possibility, she said, was that employers would leave for neighboring states with more favorable business conditions. While Missouri is one of 18 states to pass a paid sick-leave law, Nebraska is its only neighboring state to do so, and its law will not go into effect until Oct. 1 (Illinois has a broader paid leave law).

Gallick said she was concerned about businesses being drawn to Kansas for its $7.25 minimum wage, but said higher wages were not the main concern of businesses she’d spoken with.

Buddy Lahl, a former restaurateur and current CEO of the Missouri Restaurant Association, said restaurants in Missouri have for years paid above the minimum wage in order to attract and retain workers, but both provisions together would present more of a problem.

“We didn’t really oppose the minimum wage (component) because we were already paying more than the minimum wage,” he said. “But to add to that, now you’re going to add these sick-pay expenses on top of that, plus the administrative regulations that go along with that? It’s just overwhelming for a small business to adhere to.”

Lahl said Prop A would be “really harmful” to small businesses and restaurants, and combined with the impact of tariffs, “it’s really scary to be a restaurant operator in Missouri right now.” 

Though he believes Gallick’s bill would help reduce that harm, he said he thinks it would be a “heavy lift” for the Missouri Senate to pass.

He said that’s why he reached out to senators to propose compromises that would make the new regulations “more palatable” for businesses.

Some of those compromises include exempting businesses with fewer than 100 employees, only guaranteeing paid sick leave for full-time employees over the age of 18 and requiring employees to tell their employers why they’re taking sick leave.

He said that so far, he’s been pleased to see senators willing to at least listen to his ideas, though he said only a few seem willing to repeal the sick-pay provisions outright.

‘A regulatory nightmare’

While Gallick’s bill was passed out of the House, her effort to add an emergency clause failed. It would have allowed the bill — if passed by the Senate and signed into law by the governor — to go into effect immediately rather than on Aug. 28. Now, if Gallick’s bill is successful, it will go into effect months after the new law created by Prop A becomes enforceable May 1.

Lahl and Brian Brookshire, executive director of the Missouri Forest Products Association, called the situation “a regulatory nightmare” and “a human resources nightmare,” respectively.

“It becomes a real problem for the employers to communicate to the employees why things are changing again,” Brookshire said. “But if we can get a change made, it’s worth it, because it reduces the economic impact to our companies.”

Voter clarity

Gallick said another concern of hers was to what degree voters were fully informed about what they were voting on in November. 

While the ballot summary covered parts of the proposition, Prop A included eight pages of specific regulations that Gallick said people she’d spoken with hadn’t known about.

“I called some people who had voted for it and asked them, point-blank, ‘What did you vote for, and why?’ They said, ‘Minimum wage,’” Gallick said.

“I said, ‘What else? Did you vote for sick leave?’ They said ‘Yes.’ (I asked them) ‘Do you know how that is implemented?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you know what is required?’ ‘No,’” she added. 

At a press conference in March, House Speaker Jon Patterson, a Republican from Lee’s Summit, told reporters he doesn’t “subscribe to this theory that Missourians didn’t know what they were voting for. I think they knew exactly what they were voting for.”

Patterson, who acknowledged that Prop A received more support in his district than he did, said constituents had told him, “We want you to compromise … You guys need to be compromising.”

Given this, Patterson said he believed it was appropriate for the state and the public to compromise on Prop A.

Voters “are very well aware that they have a legislature and that we would come in and see what we can do to make things better for Missourians and Missouri’s small businesses,” he said. “I think what we’re seeing here is compromise between people and the government … and I think, actually, that that’s a good thing.”

The impact of paid sick leave

The Rev. Teresa Danieley, a missioner for public advocacy for the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri and an organizer with Missouri Jobs With Justice, was one of hundreds to testify against Gallick’s bill. 

“What I saw in parish ministry is that if someone loses a job because of an illness or an injury, their whole life can unravel,” Danieley told The Beacon. “They can lose their housing, they can lose their car, they can lose their children, and for what — because they were sick?”

As a priest and organizer with Missouri Jobs With Justice, Danieley said she’s been working on minimum wage campaigns since 2006, when voters approved raising the state’s minimum wage to $6.50 an hour, and since then, she said, “we’ve been building.”

Over the course of attempts to raise the minimum wage in 2012, 2015 and 2018, Danieley said she participated in a program called Labor in the Pulpit, which uses Hebrew scriptures to share information about ballot initiatives with people of different faiths. She said the values behind the provisions in Prop A could be found in scripture, as well.

Core to her faith is a commitment to “loving your neighbor as yourself and respecting the dignity of every human being and striving for justice and peace, and all of that, to me, is shown in giving people better wages and earned paid sick leave,” she said. 

Reactions to legislative efforts

Rep. Pattie Mansur, a Kansas City Democrat, said she canvassed for Prop A even before she decided to run for office because she had seen how many in her community were struggling with the cost of living.

“I talked to a lot of people who I knew would benefit from (Prop A). I live in Kansas City. I served on the Kansas City school board for seven years. I know there are a lot of people who are in minimum-wage jobs, and they’re having a hard time meeting their basic needs,” she said.

After she was elected, Mansur said she actively sought out feedback on what she should prioritize during her first term in the legislature but was not asked to push back on Prop A.

“No one came to me and said, ‘I want you to overturn Prop A. It’s going to destroy Missouri businesses,’” she said. “When I joined the (House) Commerce Committee, I made a very concerted effort to go out and meet with business groups within my district and even outside of my district, and I asked them about Prop A. I asked them about the things they cared about, and Proposition A was not a top priority. In fact, it wasn’t even really in the top five priorities.”

But “almost since the first day of session, legislators have heard of a number of bills that were designed to block Prop A’s implementation,” she said.

Tyler Ludwig — a volunteer with Missouri Jobs With Justice who works as an assistant public defender in Columbia — testified against Gallick’s bill. He said the legislation was “unsurprising but incredibly frustrating.”

Ludwig, who stressed that he was only speaking in his personal capacity, said he testified because “I wanted to do what I could to … make them realize that people are paying attention and there is going to be pushback if you try to subvert the will of the people.”

Gallick said she understood voters’ concerns about her bill, but she stressed she was “looking at this through an economic lens.”

“I don’t want us to lose businesses. I don’t want people to cut staff. I don’t want more self-service kiosks,” she said. “That’s my motive — keeping the economy going and making sure that Missouri is growing economically.”

Fran Marion, an organizer with Stand Up KC and the Missouri Workers Center who also works at Wendy’s, said that in her current position, missing a day because she or someone in her family is sick costs her about $90. 

“$90 can make or break a light bill, rent, food in the house, even helping out my kids if they had to pay their bills or if my grandson needed something,” she said. “Paid sick days would help immensely.”

“People don’t realize that this is not something that we’re asking to be given to us. It’s still something we have to earn. (Prop A) states that for every 30 hours a worker works, they get one hour of paid sick leave,” she added. “That’s still a predicament, because I’ve got to work 240 hours just to get a full paid sick day.”

She said an ideal system would provide automatic paid sick leave and “a living wage that keeps up with the economy,” because “everything in the economy has gone up except for wages.”

Gallick, who has a background in business and said that at one point she worked three jobs to make ends meet, said she wants people to be able to have good benefits and make as much money as possible.

“I was a waitress, I was a substitute teacher and I was a merchandiser in the consumer products industry … I understand it is not easy sometimes. I am not disparaging anybody that is making minimum wage or working a lower-level job,” she said. “I understand the difficulties, but I still believe that especially sick-leave policies should be between the employer and the employee.”

Delays in challenging

Danieley said that while she had been expecting resistance to the proposition from business and other groups in the state, “I think it’s really bizarre that they didn’t challenge Prop A at any time along the way until it was already passed by over 57 percent of voters.”

“There was an opportunity to challenge that last summer, before that ballot language was drafted, and that didn’t happen,” Mansur said. “That ballot language was vetted, was crafted by the secretary of state’s office, and there was an open period in which that language could be challenged and questioned, and it didn’t happen.”

Lahl acknowledged that the Missouri Restaurant Association had not been quick to challenge the policy when it was still an initiative petition or while it was being crafted into a ballot question.

“I don’t know why we didn’t. I don’t think we fully understood what was really happening until it was well underway. I’ve been CEO for just a little over a year, so I’m just getting my bearings,” he said. “Had this been next year when this came around, we definitely would have put up more of an educational campaign.”

Meanwhile, the Missouri Forest Products Association wasn’t aware of Proposition A before it had gathered enough signatures to get on the ballot, and even then, they only knew what would be included on the ballot, not the additional pages of regulation, Brookshire said.

“It wasn’t on our radar before it passed, and we, like a lot of people, read what was on the ballot, not what was filed with the secretary of state’s office, so unfortunately, we were not very familiar with all of the different components involved with the proposition,” Brookshire said.