Heber Springs Mayor and 1st Congressional District candidate Jackie McPherson on Tuesday endorsed a proposed state ballot initiative to raise Arkansas’ hourly minimum wage to $8.50 by 2017.
McPherson, a Democrat who was elected mayor in 2006, made the public announcement in West Memphis but said he’d made up his mind on the issue a long time ago. “We’ve always supported the initiative,” he said in an interview.
“The minimum wage in Arkansas is too low; $6.25 is too low for anyone to support themselves, let alone a family,” he said. McPherson is running against Republican U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford of Jonesboro.
The initiative is sponsored by the group Give Arkansas a Raise Now. It would gradually increase the state minimum wage in Arkansas from $6.25 per hour to $7.50 per hour on Jan. 1, 2015; $8 on Jan. 1, 2016; and then to $8.50 on Jan. 1, 2017.
Arkansas is one of four states with a minimum wage lower than the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. A company can use the lower state minimum wage if its annual revenue is less than $500,000 a year and it doesn’t engage in interstate commerce, according to the state Department of Labor.
On Tuesday, McPherson carried a clipboard with a ballot initiative petition attached, and he said he would be canvassing to gather signatures for the measure.
The mayor said that after high school, he worked on an assembly line for $2.50 per hour. He said when he opened McPherson’s Family Restaurant — a Heber Springs business he still owns but no longer runs — he paid his employees more than the minimum wage.
McPherson said that paying more helped him retain better-quality employees and didn’t affect his ability to hire new employees.
“I’ve been there and done that. I know what it’s like to get paid minimum wage,” McPherson said.
McPherson said he did not support and would vote against a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10, stating that “in some states that may be OK, but in Arkansas … it’s just too big a jump, too drastic a jump for us.”
Stephen Copley, the chairman of Give Arkansas a Raise Now, said the group has gathered about 51,000 signatures using volunteers and paid canvassers. The group needs 62,507 signatures from registered voters in the state to appear on the ballot.
Copley said McPherson is the third Democratic candidate for statewide or congressional office to endorse the initiative, along with U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor and gubernatorial candidate and former Congressman Mike Ross, but that his group is issue-based and nonpartisan.
“We’re happy to have him and would be happy to have any other folks who want to support [the initiative],” Copley said.
Crawford spokesman Jonah Shumate said in an email that the House hasn’t voted on raising the minimum wage during Crawford’s time in office, but that the congressman does not support the president’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour.
“Rep. Crawford supports allowing voters to self govern through ballot initiatives. As with many previous state ballot initiatives, he will not be taking a public position. However, Rep. Crawford does join many Republicans and Democrats in opposing President Obama’s job-killing minimum wage proposal, which would hurt many small businesses and farming operations across the First District,” Shumate said.