Minimum wage raise supporters turn in signatures, but did they fall short?

Supporters of a citizen initiative to establish a citywide minimum wage within Greensboro’s municipal boundaries of $9.36 per hour handed over a bin containing more than 6,000 signed petitions to City Clerk Juanita Cooper on Monday. The current state minimum wage is $6.15 per hour.

Should the city clerk find the petitions sufficient, the measure would automatically go before the city council for consideration. And if a majority of council were to reject the proposed ordinance — which is likely — the proposal goes before the voters. Jim Boyett, co-chair of the Greensboro Minimum Wage Committee, said that might happen in either the primary or general elections next year.

Questions arose yesterday about whether supporters of the initiative had gathered a sufficient number of signatures. The Greensboro charter states that any initiative petition must be signed by qualified voters of a number equal to 25 percent of voters in the preceding municipal election. The group collected 6,412 signatures, according to committee member Fahiym Hanna. That number exceeds 25 percent of the qualified voters in the 2005 election — 19,294 — but falls short of 25 percent of the 2007 total — 33,752 — when an open mayoral seat drove a surge in turnout.

Supporters of the minimum wage initiative said they understood that the 2005 campaign statistics were operative.

“When the committee went to the election board for the procedure, we learned that there’s a one-year period to collect signatures,” said Ed Whitfield, a member of the committee. “The number of signatures is supposed to be 25 percent of those who voted in the last election. The only good-faith way we could figure out what that means is to refer to the 2005 election, since we didn’t know how many people would vote in 2007. We had a one-year time period starting Dec. 1, 2006 that is stamped on the front page that we handed in to the city clerk.” (Whitfield added that the committee was told by someone in the city manager’s office that since Dec. 1, 2007 fell on a Saturday they could turn over the petitions the following Monday.)

Charlie Collicutt, deputy director of the Guilford County Board of Elections, said he provided no assurance to the committee that its computation would be validated.

“I have spoken to these people in the past and all I have been doing is providing them statistics,” he said. “We have not authorized a certain set of numbers that they have to use because I am not an expert on the city charter, and we don’t have jurisdiction to make that decision.”

He added, “I honestly have no idea what numbers they’re supposed to use. From my rudimentary understanding of the city charter, it says 'the last election,' but I’m not an expert.”

The city clerk has five days to determine the sufficiency of the petitions and to forward them to the board of elections to validate that the signatures correspond to qualified voters.

Supporters of the initiative described raising the minimum wage as a “moral imperative.”

“We feel on the Minimum Wage Committee that companies and business that come into our cities to abuse workers, this has to stop,” said committee co-chair Marilyn Baird. “And what we’re saying here is that they can afford it. Nine thirty-six is what the spending power of the minimum wage was in 1968 when the minimum wage was a dollar and ninety cents.”

Whitfield argued that raising the minimum wage was a matter of both fairness and good economics.

“Productivity of workers has increased,” he said. “Profits have increased. Executive compensation has increased. The only thing that hasn’t increased is the wages of workers. We really think this is an important part of our quality of life.”

He added: “There are all kinds of predictions of doom and gloom economically, but in cities where this has been done like San Francisco and Santa Fe, their economies have improved.”

Supporters said they garnered signatures from three city council representatives (all African American), and County Commission Chairman Paul Gibson. District 2 Councilwoman Goldie Wells was on hand to express her support.



Baird said the petitioners ran into Wells in the parking lot of the Food Lion grocery at the intersection of East Market and English streets in the summer. “She agreed to sign it immediately,” Baird said. “We didn’t have to talk to her a lot, bending her arm and knocking her groceries out of her hands.”

Four council members have gone on record as being opposed to raising the minimum wage in Greensboro: Robbie Perkins, Zack Matheny, Mike Barber and Trudy Wade. Two, Sandra Anderson Groat and Mary Rakestraw, said in a recent candidate’s survey that they remained undecided.