Abusive preemption and the Georgia workers it leaves behind

Americans might not agree on everything, but here’s one common belief: wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living.

This is a truth we face at the grocery store, at the gas pump and when our household budgets demand tradeoffs between healthcare and housing. The idea of raising wages is met with skepticism and hostility. Small businesses cannot bear the costs, the excuse goes, and if you want more, learn more. Yet both the data and history shows that if we want to tackle the cost of living, the wages for working must meet demand.

Study after study has proven that wage increases do not harm small businesses and might actually increase revenue through rising productivity. We also get fed the lie that what we’ve got is all we can afford, despite proof that the harm is coming from our own leaders — from federal cuts to healthcare and nutrition programs in states that have refused to expand Medicaid or accept SNAP funds to high childcare costs met by cuts to Head Start. Rural schools get just enough to survive — not thrive — while they dismantle and defund education.

Affordability might be the current term of art, but for too many of our families, this mismatch between what comes in and what goes out seems permanent and unfixable. Neither is true. It’s a choice being made by elected leaders, the wealthy with a voice and others who have been gaslit against the truth.

Here in Georgia and across the country, false narratives and bad math are weaponized against smart policy. Whether it’s our political leaders or the groups that fund them, recycled mistruths are peddled to justify stagnant wages and rising prices. Old tropes and folksy anecdotes stand in the way of solving an economic crisis that will only get worse if public leaders refuse to act.

When a society can’t afford to make a living, it starts to fall apart. Look no further than the rural towns without hospitals or jobs and with dollar stores where grocery stores used to be. This is a national failure, but the laws in Georgia exacerbate the problem here at home. In reality, this strain could be eased by raising the local minimum wage to something close to what the area’s cost of living requires.

For others, receiving paid leave benefits means they can afford to care for their families without forgoing a day’s pay. Tax policies that privilege wealthy retirees over seniors who need to work at Walmart means the disparities last. However, long-standing efforts to strip away local authority have placed raising wages or creating policies that benefit workers out of reach.

Your town may have a high cost of living, but local leaders are barred from implementing a minimum wage that exceeds $7.25 per hour. I know this because I helped craft one of Georgia’s first living wage laws when I was a lawyer for the city of Atlanta, which the Republican state legislature and governor quickly banned. Likewise, your job doesn’t offer paid leave, so paying bills gets even harder when you have to take off work to care for a sick child.

Once again, the local football coach who represents you in Atlanta under the Gold Dome probably voted to deny your city council the right to fix this. When I was in the state legislature, I fought hard to stop Georgia legislators from adopting laws to specifically prevent local governments from requiring workers to be paid more, be offered benefits like paid leave, or setting standards for how local government contractors are treated. Cronies made more, and the people of Georgia paid the bill.

When a state government prevents local government from creating policy in the interest of its citizens, it’s called abusive preemption. The common thread with laws like these is corporations benefit from them and Georgia’s workers don’t. The politicians are no longer working for the people, and the people have to work harder just to stay afloat.

Abusive preemption laws do not simply harm workers and their families; they threaten our democracy. Laws that remove local power and consolidate it at higher levels of government silence voters’ voices. That silence weakens our ability to shape our communities.

As a former lawmaker, I can tell you firsthand that these bill writers are crafty. These rules are not created in a vacuum nor are they born here in the Peach State. These anti-working family laws go hand in hand with other mechanisms for government overreach like mid-cycle redistricting to consolidate power and maintain the status quo, which is maximum profits for corporations and economic precarity for the rest of us.

This year, a bill was introduced that would have done away with preemption of paid leave or higher minimum wages and made way for local progress. Republicans killed the bill, despite the harm that comes to everyone — across political parties. This isn’t a Democrat versus Republican issue. This is a democracy versus authoritarian issue. Who will be in charge: the people or the powerful?

While this bill didn’t pass, we shouldn’t despair. We can instead take it as proof that there is a way to dismantle the structure that prevents communities from demanding better for their workforce, and we can band together to create change.

We can demand better for Georgia workers and better for democracy itself. We must remember that laws that protect government overreach can be changed and that power can be returned to local governments, and by extension, returned to the people. We can pick a side: our own.

Stacey Abrams is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and host of the podcast “Assembly Required.” She previously served as minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives.