One Fair Wage continues to collect signatures to get $15 minimum wage on next year’s ballot

Protestors rally against subminimum wages. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for One Fair Wage)

Minimum wage won’t be on Ohio’s ballot this year, but it could be on next year’s.

After a day of mixed messaging last week, One Fair Wage ultimately failed to submit the necessary signatures to the Ohio Secretary of State to get their initiative on the November ballot.

But One Fair Wage is continuing to collect signatures across Ohio and plans to submit more than 600,000 signatures by the end of summer to be on the November 2025 ballot, said One Fair Wage President Saru Jayaraman.

They are working to make sure they have signatures from 44 counties, which is part of the requirement to be on the ballot, she said.

“The plan was not to kill it all together,” Jayaraman said. “… We feel extraordinarily confident that once we’re on the ballot, we’ll win.”

She said even though they technically had the required amount of signatures needed to get on the ballot last week, they wanted to give themselves “more of a cushion.”

If One Fair Wage gets on Ohio’s ballot next year, their timeline of bumping minimum wage up to $15 an hour in 2026 would remain the same, she said. Their proposal would also get rid of Ohio’s tipped wage.

Ohio’s current minimum wage is $10.45 for non-tipped workers and $ 5.25 (plus tips) for tipped workers. The federal minimum wage is $7.25.

“Ohio needs an increase in the minimum wage,” said Michael Shields, an economist with Policy Matters Ohio.

Raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026 would help nearly 1 million Ohioans — nearly one-fifth of Ohio’s workforce, according to Policy Matters Ohio.

Ohio previously passed a citizen initiated constitutional amendment in 2006 that raised the state minimum wage to $6.85 an hour. It has gone on to raise the minimum wage every year since based on the consumer price index.

“It’s never going to have the ability to push people up,” Shields said. “Am I doing any better than I was last year? No, accounting for inflation I’m doing exactly the same as I was last year. … It’s a safeguard against loss of buying power.”

Opposition

One Fair Wage has faced much opposition from the Ohio Restaurant & Hospitality Alliance, who predicted restaurant operators would be forced to raise their menu prices by about 20-30% if this had passed.

“The failure to submit enough signatures to eliminate the tipped wage, which is so valued by servers and bartenders, is a clear indication that Ohioans do not want outside special interest groups such as One Fair Wage changing our state’s constitution,” John Barker, president and CEO of the Ohio Restaurant & Hospitality Alliance, said in a statement last week.

They published a survey earlier this year that showed 93% of Ohio servers and bartender s want to keep the current tipping system with a base wage and tips, and that the median income for tipped workers in Ohio is $27 an hour.

State Sen. Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township, introduced a bill earlier this year as a way to stop the One Fair Wage initiative. Senate Bill 256 would raise the minimum wage for non-tipped workers to $15 and tipped to $7.50 by 2028.

$15 an hour

Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Washington D.C., Washington, and California all have minimum wages of at least $15, according to E conomic Policy Institute .

The “Fight for 15” campaign started in New York in 2012 and that is a figure advocates continue to strive for.

“I think the $15 number is just an artifact of the Fight for 15 that has been a long standing effort from working people and started out as a very grassroots effort by workers in the fast food industry to hit that 15 number,” Shields said. “… You need more than $15 in every county in Ohio for a single person to cover the basic cost of living.”

Ohioans need to be making at least $20.81 an hour working a full-time job to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to a new joint report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

The federal minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60, which was worth between $14-15 in today’s terms, Shields said.

“Even if we reach $15 in Ohio, the lowest paid workers are not going to have secured any gains in terms of overall growth,” Shields said. “If we’re just waiting for inflation to push the nominal minimum wage up to $15, then the minimum wage isn’t actually going to be worth any more than it is today.”

$15 is an amount One Fair Wage believes most people in Ohio would support, Jayaraman said.

“It’s also the absolute bare minimum below which nobody should be in Ohio ,” she said. “ T hen we do hope that most people are getting closer to the actual cost of living when the minimum wage goes up.”

One Fair Wage​​

One Fair Wage, a national organization that advocates for employers to pay workers the full minimum wage, works to try to pass ballot measures and legislation.

Seven states have gotten rid of tipped minimum wages — California , Nevada , Alaska, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. One Fair Wage, however, did not play a role in any of those states initially getting rid of tipped wages, Jayaraman said.

One Fair Wage did help pass minimum wage initiatives in Flagstaff, Arizona, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

The Raise the Wage Act — which would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour — has been introduced in each Congress since 2017. The U.S. House of Representatives has previously passed the bill , but that’s the furthest it’s ever gone.

One Fair Wage will be on the ballot in Massachusetts this November, has submitted signatures to be on the ballot in Arizona and is moving legislation in Illinois and Maryland, Jayaraman said.

Follow OCJ Reporter Megan Henry on Twitter.

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