Yesterday, my onsite mentor asked me to outline the impacts and effects of Prop 206 on education since he is currently being interviewed a lot on this topic. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Prop 206 is a proposition recently passed into law on Arizona minimum wage and paid time off. This law increased the minimum wage to $10/hour on January 1st, increasing incrementally until it stabilizes to $12/hour in 2020. My job was basically to gather information to support the idea that Prop 206 is detrimental towards teacher salaries.
To do this, I read about Prop 206 and watched some presentations to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education on January 25th. Many school district superintendents and officials presented their views, along with the campaign chair for Prop 206.
Overall, Prop 206 presented many problems for school districts, one of the main concerns being that it's an unfunded mandate. This means that employers were not given additional funding to cover the costs of increasing wages to meet the legal requirement. As a result, school districts had to pull funds from other portions of their budget to meet the new requirements. On top of this, more money went to workers in lower-level and non-instructional areas while those in instructional areas (teachers, for example) saw little to no increase in pay—unintentionally, Prop 206 shifted the focus of the budget more towards operational costs than classroom costs.
Then there's the issue of wage compression. I'll give you an example because, let's be honest, I will probably confuse you with crazy adjectives and adverbs. Let's suppose that a staff member such as a janitor was paid $9/hour before the new law and the janitorial supervisor was paid $9.50/hour. Once the new law went into effect, both employees were bumped up to $10/hour. But one of these people works for the other. Ahhh problem! Ideally, employers would give the supervisor an adjustment and pay him/her $10.50/hour. But since they already have to make room in the budget to accommodate the new law, adjusting pay schedules would cost significantly more. Not paying the supervisor more, however, would motivate him/her to quit, aka lower employee retention rates.
Since substitutes usually don't have regular schedules, under this new law, they could accumulate paid sick time and then make use of it in a problematic way. If the substitutes have access to paid sick leave as well, school districts are faced with the issue of employing substitutes for substitutes.
As we can see, there can be a lot of crazy, unanticipated issues with a simple minimum wage law. I'm sure voters didn't expect education to get hit so hard by the prop, but unfortunately, as with any law, there were unforeseen circumstances and they caused problems for both employers and employees.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I'll be happy to answer. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on this so don't be mad at me if I respond with "I really don't know."
I didn't expect to enjoy thinking about minimum wage and its impact on school districts this much, but it quickly became a very interesting topic. If wage policies are this interesting, I can only imagine how awesome everything else I learn about is going to be! I'm so excited to be working on this! Yay!! Thank you to everyone who read my babbling and see you for the next post.
Hey Shreya! Sounds like you are really enjoying your time there! It never ceases to amaze me how laws have so many more consequences then what they were intended. Something as simple as a minimum wage increase can impact so many different aspects of business and life in general. How did you research it all? What sources did you use, and did your mentor give them to you? As a lobbyist, it seems like life can be very complicated and even more stressful. I am glad to hear that even with such a fast-paced lifestyle of the lobbyist, you are enjoying your time there. Sounds like we need people like you to help us through all this. I will check in next week for more witty gifs and jokes, and interesting lobbyist jazz!
ReplyDeleteHi Brent! I really am enjoying my time at the Chamber! Everything is just so interesting in one way or another. My mentor only asked me to watch the House Appropriations Subcommittee presentations, but I wanted to learn more and make my notes as good as possible, so I searched for and read the full Prop 206 text and some other op-ed articles about it to get a couple other perspectives and examples. I agree with you about the life of the lobbyist. My mentor is so good at what he does, but it just seems like so much work! He does it all amazingly though so it's great to watch him work and give talks about this stuff. I'm glad you're enjoying my weirdo sense of humor. I'm enjoying your blog too!
DeleteHi Shreya! Well, first congrats to Shreya the Wonderful and Amazing for successfully completing your first assignment! It sounds like you're having a wonderful time on site!
ReplyDeleteIt's so crazy how a law that was meant to be beneficial can have unintentional adverse effects. What was it like to watch those presentations? Did you have to read through the actual Prop 206 or just materials pertaining to it? Also, I really like that you gave us a simple example to explain the problem of wage compression. Anyways, I appreciated all of your gifs! Can't wait to check back in next week and see what other interesting topic you have to share!
Hi Anjalee! Thanks for acknowledging my awesome epithet. I really am enjoying my time onsite. It's all so cool! At first, I didn't really expect that the presentations would be very interesting. I've attended some committee meeting like this once before (I think...it may have been something else) and that one was about parking rules or something and it was really boring. I don't know why I was there actually. My point is though that the presentations ended up being really interesting as you can see and I had a lot of fun doing this work. I didn't have to read through anything else besides watching the presentations, but I'm crazy so I read the full Prop 206 text and some other op-ed articles about it to get a couple other perspectives and examples. I'm so glad you enjoyed reading this post! See you next time!
DeleteWow, Shreya, this is all so amazing! Do you have any thoughts as to solutions to the unintended effects? I'm learning so much from your blog!
ReplyDeleteHi Stirling! I'm glad you enjoyed it. As to the unintended effects, if you mean for any law, I think if we were able to think of every single issue that could come up with a law and qualify it with sections that addressed those issues beforehand, we could resolve the unintended effects. But, obviously, this is pretty impossible since it's hard to foresee all the effects of a law. I do know, however, that it's possible to amend these laws by having the public vote on an amendment too, so that could potentially resolve these issues as well. Thanks for reading!
DeleteHi Shreya,
ReplyDeleteYour analogy made it really easy to understand and your blog is extremely entertaining. I was just curious as to your stance on Prop 206. If you could, would you keep it or remove it?
Hi Michael! Thank you for the comment. I think as it is now, I would be in favor of removing it because it does cause trouble for both employers and employees. However, I think if additional funding is provided for employers to accommodate the wage increase instead of having to pull from other parts of their budgets, Prop 206 would be beneficial for minimum wage workers to live a better-quality life.
DeleteHi Shreya! This sounds really interesting. Maybe they should have provisions in the law for temporary workers, like substitutes. Also, I am concerned about the implication that the money to compensate the increase of minimum wage must come from teacher salaries. I am sure that there is overhead that can be cut or possibly cuts can be made to all of the money that is used to fund the athletic programs in district schools. Anyway, great research! I can't wait to read what you post next week!
ReplyDeleteHi Mrs. Bailey! I'm glad you found this interesting! One of the things I noticed when watching the presentations was that some people who presented spoke to the committee about creating provisions that accounted for temporary workers. However, the committee said that to modify the law, it would have to go back to the ballot again for a vote to change anything. That's why I think the committee emphasized that the presentations were held as a way to see if the law truly needs additional government funding. So far, school districts have been pulling funds from wherever they can in the budget and unfortunately, this sometimes comes from instructional areas like teacher's salaries. Hopefully, the additional funding initiative pulls through and Prop 206 becomes a funded mandate. Anyways, thank you for reading! I'm excited to share my senior project journey with you!
DeleteHey Shreya! Great post here! It seems like your having fun researching a topic that you are passionate about at your site! Your blog taught me a lot on Prop 206, and with your funny gifs/memes, it was a very good read! It really is surprising how a law that was intended to help people created these unfavorable effects. What I am curious about is what actions are lawmakers taking to fix these problems? What solutions have policy makers proposed? Also with regards to the problem related to substitute teachers, are they treated as full-time employees and would maybe treating them as part-time employees make a difference towards the problem? Again, this post was very interesting to me and I can't wait to hear more from you on this matter!
ReplyDeleteHi Anirudh! So far, there's been hearings at the Subcommittee I talk about in my post and at the Maricopa County Superior Court over this issue. Since the main problem is that Prop 206 did not identify a funding source for the wage increase, the proposed solution is currently to find/grant a source of money to adapt to the new changes, e.g. increased government funding for education. Also, as I explained in the post, the text does not differentiate between sick time accrual for part-time and full-time workers, so that is why the dilemma about substitute teachers is such a big problem. Thanks for reading!
DeleteHi Shreya! Your information about prop 206 is very interesting, however is there a connection between lobbyists and prop 206. If there is, I would be wondering if that connection is good or bad.
ReplyDeleteHi Javier! As with any law, there is a connection to lobbyists. Lobbyists (like my mentor) are constantly speaking to people (whether this is giving talks, speaking to legislators/voters, etc.) to shape policies. For Prop 206, my mentor is gathering support to challenge the law and say that it takes away from instructional areas, so I think these connections to lobbying are very beneficial. Thanks for reading!
DeleteHi Shreya. Your post was very intriguing, especially how it affects teachers. Are there any other areas affected other than teacher salaries? If so, how do the changes in those areas affect students and/or faculty members?
ReplyDeleteHi Jacob! Besides negatively affecting instructional areas, Prop 206 can also take away from parent-paid programs like school lunch programs. In this case, to accommodate the budget increase, the school districts and lunch organizers would raise rates for school lunches, negatively affecting students, their families, staff, and faculty who use the school lunch program. Thanks for the question!
DeleteHi Shreya! I think that it's first of all amazing that you paid such close attention to what the proposition affects, such as substitute teachers and other faculty members, not only the general worker that works for money under the $12/hour mark. I also find it amazing that you are working on such a big issue with teachers and something that affects us directly as students. Good luck!
ReplyDeleteHi Marvin! Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm glad you're taking interest in this issue and I hope you continue enjoying the posts!
DeleteHi Shreya. I like how you looked into the negative effects of Prop 206 as a result of it being an unfunded mandate, especially since these impacts and effects carry over to schools. With that being said though, are there any current goals to try and make this Prop. funded or not as of now?
ReplyDeleteHi Alex! So, currently, there are a lot of organizations (like the AZ Chamber of Commerce!) fighting to get some funding for businesses and employers in Arizona to accommodate the increase in cost, so hopefully, that pulls through and additional funding is provided. With regards to education, we can see that the House Appropriations Subcommittee is already working on supplying additional funds by increasing the education budget for Arizona. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how everything turns out!
Delete