OKLAHOMA CITY — In the battle over the minimum wage in Oklahoma, the money has been flowing – to advertisers, but not to the workers.
People for Opportunity, an Oklahoma City-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit with ties to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, is flooding the airwaves with ads claiming that State Question 832, which would raise Oklahoma’s minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 by 2029, would raise inflation and harm low-wage earning Oklahomans.
There’s only one problem with that argument: inflation is already harming low-wage earning Oklahomans. Everything is going up – except our paychecks.
Employers claim that they will have to offset the cost of increasing worker pay by increasing prices. Fine. For years, they’ve been offsetting the rising costs of materials, financing charges, supply chain issues – and steadily increasing CEO pay – by cutting costs only where the worker is concerned. They’ve had no problem whatsoever raising the cost of their goods and services to cover the rising cost of everything else.
If this keeps up, a significant portion of the population won’t be able to keep our economy going because they won’t have the funds to participate. Already, more and more Oklahomans are scrambling to find a home they can afford. More Oklahomans are struggling to feed their families as the price of groceries skyrockets. Prices are already going up – and no one can blame rising worker pay for the inflation we are currently experiencing.
Oklahoma would hardly be the first state to increase its minimum wage to something higher than the federal rate. Already, more than 30 states and the District of Columbia have set a higher minimum wage than the federal rate. The lowest minimum wage for those states is Florida, at $13 an hour, though that is set to increase to $15 this year. In New York, where the cost of living is significantly higher, the minimum wage is $17.
The sky has not fallen in those states. Several economic analyses have shown that raising the minimum wage does not reap the catastrophic effects being touted in the ads against SQ 832. A study published by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research found that, looking at changes in restaurant food pricing during the period of 1978–2015, prices rose by just 0.36% for every 10% increase in the minimum wage, which is only about half the size reported in previous studies. They also observe that small minimum wage increases do not lead to higher prices and may actually reduce prices. Furthermore, it is also possible that small minimum wage increases could lead to increased employment in low-wage labor markets.
SQ 832 will appear on the June 16 primary ballot in Oklahoma. Getting the measure on the ballot was a hard-won victory for a grassroots effort. Though the measure qualified for a vote back in 2024, state officials put it off until the 2026 June primary, knowing fewer Oklahomans show up to the polls to vote in the primaries than they do in the general election.
Repeated attempts to raise the state’s minimum wage proposed by lawmakers in the Oklahoma Legislature had been repeatedly defeated, strongly opposed by lobbyists for business interests. Eventually, the people took the matter into their own hands, just as they had for Medicaid expansion.
Oklahoma still sets its minimum wage at the federal minimum wage level, which was set to $7.25 an hour in July 2009 – some 17 years ago. This is the longest period in U.S. history without a federal minimum wage increase.
“If someone in our state works full-time, they shouldn’t be in poverty,” Shiloh Kantz, executive director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute, said at an April forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Oklahoma. “That’s not a strong economy. That’s a broken one.”
The full accounting for who is paying for the ads for and against won’t be available until after the election. Though we don’t know how much has been spent altogether on these ads, one thing is certain – that amount would have been better spent on increasing worker pay.
