Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Our analysis relies on a comprehensive dataset of 19 years of state preemption activity related to workers’ rights across 15 labor policy subjects.

1. What is the association between less diverse state-level governments and state preemption of local workers’ rights?
2. Are republican controlled state-level governments more likely to adopt preemption measures?
3. How is union strength associated with state preemption?

State preemption of local ordinances is rapidly expanding into many policy areas, including anti-discrimination and labor law (Briffault 2018; Fowler and Witt 2019). ALEC, a nonprofit organization of conservative state and private sector representatives, has promoted the “Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act” as a model bill for state-level political representatives to preempt local minimum wage increases (Hertel-Fernandez 2019). Since 1997, over 30 state legislatures have passed bills preempting local labor standards with many becoming law (von Wilpert 2017).

Local level representatives and constituents may be more progressive and diverse, plus inclined to support poverty alleviation, anti-discrimination, and equity initiatives. Women of color earn 61 cents for every dollar white men earn and constitute half of the low wage workforce (NWLC 2019). State legislatures are approximately 83% white and 71% male, whereas gubernatorial representation includes 26 Republicans and 24 Democrats of which only nine are women and 47 are white.

Our work is unique in empirically testing how the race and gender composition of local constituencies and local and state political representation is associated with state preemption of local workers’ rights legislation. This novel research is politically and socially significant.