Ohio’s working families made a bold move to improve their lives and their communities today by placing an initiative on November’s ballot that would give the state’s workers a long-overdue minimum wage increase.

With poverty on the rise and working families scraping to make ends meet, it’s appalling that Republican Leadership in Congress continues to play games with the minimum wage at the expense of hard-working Americans. In the face of continued inaction in Congress, Ohio working families have taken matters into their own hands to remove politics from the equation. Today working people in Ohio roundly rejected the shameful political ploy orchestrated by Republican Leadership last week.

We applaud Ohioans for a Fair Minimum Wage -- a coalition of community, faith-based and labor organizations co-chaired by the Ohio AFL-CIO -- that fought so hard to get this vital initiative on the ballot.

Working families in Ohio and across the country are sending a clear message that they won’t wait around for Congress to act. The AFL-CIO’s “America Needs a Raise Campaign” is going state by state to ensure that low-wage workers get the pay increase they’ve been waiting nearly 10 years for and we won’t stop until all of America’s workers receive the wage increase they justly deserve.

Contact: Steve Smith, 202-637-5018