The primary elections for Ohio are approaching soon. Both early in-person and absentee mail-in voting has started, and election day is May 6. Everyone should be ready to vote. Not only has The Oberlin Review endorsed Farah Emeka, OC ’97, for the Municipal Court Judge position (“Editorial Board Endorses Farah Lillian Emeka For Oberlin Municipal Court Judge,” The Oberlin Review, March 14, 2025), but Issue 2 — authorizing the state to issue bonds or other measures to finance public infrastructure projects in Oberlin — is another pertinent issue that we all should provide our input on as members of this community.
The purpose of this article is not to provide commentary on our primary ballot, but to discuss a vital measure that we must ensure is on our ballot for this year’s general election in November. That measure is the Ohio Minimum Wage Increase Initiative. Ohioans have relentlessly mobilized to bring this to our ballot, but have repeatedly failed, for no reason other than the resistance that conservative lawmakers and lobbyists have mounted.
In 2024, Raise the Wage Ohio worked to gather enough support for a measure that would raise Ohio’s minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers. Currently, our state has two minimum wages: one for workers who receive tips and one for those who do not. Non-tipped workers’ minimum hourly wage is $10.70. Tipped workers, based on how much they receive in tips, are allowed to be paid by their employers as little as $5.35 per hour.
Additionally, for employees with physical or mental disabilities, the state has discretion to authorize certain employers to pay these workers an even smaller wage. These conditions are unambiguously barbarous. It is our right under the 14th Amendment to be protected from laws that discriminate against people on the basis of one’s disabilities, yet our state constitution explicitly sanctions this exact transgression. Not only would the Raise the Wage initiative increase the state’s minimum wage, but it would also abolish such discriminatory practices.
For workers who rely on tips, their hourly wage will no longer be at the mercy of the daily fluctuations of tipping culture. The $15 minimum hourly wage would be all-encompassing, with no exceptions for how many tips a worker receives. The United States is at the top of a small list of countries worldwide where tipping culture is a norm. That is because it is an illogical system that gives employers an excuse to provide their employees with intolerably small wages. A tip is a tip. It is not a substitute for a living wage, and the dominant culture in America has allowed employers to treat it as such to the detriment of millions of workers across the country. In Ohio, we have the chance to be an outlier. A $15 minimum wage is certainly not enough to transform our national working culture into something that is just, fair, and equitable. But it is a valuable first step on the path to create a culture where all workers are given the unconditional respect and dignity they deserve as human beings.
This initiative failed to satisfy Ohio’s requirements to get on the ballot during last year’s general election. And so, countless workers must continue to persevere, provide and thrive under unjust and unfair working conditions. Inevitably, some workers will not be able to withstand such conditions. For as long as the minimum wage remains the same, the statistically-proven correlation between low wages and poverty, suicide, homicide, and higher infant mortality will remain intact. We have the agency to change or maintain this paradigm within Ohio.
From within Ohio’s state legislature, lawmakers have also attempted to raise the minimum wage. But these measures alone are insufficient to implement crucial changes to the workforce. While the Raise the Wage initiative would raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2026, lawmakers have already introduced bills that would raise the wage to that same amount by 2028 or 2030. However, such bills would continue to differentiate between tipped and non-tipped workers and continue to allow the state to authorize wage discrimination based on a worker’s disability. For this kind of legislation, we cannot settle for mediocrity.
Business interests attempted to present a universal $15 minimum wage as a false choice to workers between access to tips and a raised minimum wage, when that could not be further from the truth. The proposal would force employers to permit their employees to receive tips without a negative impact on their default pay stub. Workers with disabilities would be given their due constitutional rights as defined by the 14th Amendment. The history of tipping culture in the U.S. shows us that business owners who want to warp the facts only want to maximally line their own pockets, regardless of their employees’ wellbeing. Last year, they were truly frightened that they’d have to finally pay up.
Ohio’s ballot procedures require an initiative to receive at least 413,488 valid signatures by July 2 to be included on the ballot. Last year, Raise the Wage reported to have received more than 400,000 signatures by May. This means that the initiative failed to make it onto the ballot by a razor-thin margin. It would be a shame to give up now, when we are on the verge of victory. It is unclear whether or not the Raise the Wage Ohio will resume operations for this upcoming election. Raise the Wage has not yet responded to requests for comment from the Review on their future plans. But it is crystal clear that this initiative would be immensely popular, only if Ohioans actually had the chance to vote on it. We must do what we can to maintain this momentum. In this current moment, workers’ interests are perhaps more in flux than ever before in the 21st century. When working Americans are watching their administration cut swaths of social security benefits, access to health care, veterans’ assistance and much more — all to give handouts to America’s wealthiest individuals — the time is crucial now more than ever for us to win something.
Reach out to organizations on our campus and around our community that are working to advance workers’ rights. Reach out to One Fair Wage, the parent organization to Raise the Wage Ohio. We must all do what we can to revitalize this movement, now more than ever, because we are historically close to winning.
