SENATE REVIEW / From the desk of Sen. Kendal Sacchieri
The arrogance of SQ 832 is stunning. This measure looks every Oklahoma employer in the eye and says: You may have built the business. You may make the payroll. You may know your employees, your customers, your margins and your community. But none of that matters. The government knows better.
Supporters want voters to hear “higher wages” and stop asking questions. A worker gets a raise. Everyone feels good. End of story.
But anyone who has ever run a business, worked on a farm or tried to keep a small-town operation alive knows it doesn’t work that way.
SQ 832 would raise Oklahoma’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2029. Once it hits $15, it keeps climbing automatically every year, tied to a federal cost-of-living index. No vote. No debate. No review by the Legislature I was elected to serve in. No consideration for what’s happening in Oklahoma’s economy or whether your business is in Blanchard, Purcell, Rush Springs or Duncan. Just an automatic increase, year after year.
That is an extraordinary amount of power to hand over to a formula. And rural Oklahoma will pay for it first.
A family farm cannot simply absorb higher labor costs because activists in Oklahoma City think it sounds fair. A small-town café cannot raise prices forever. A feed store, hardware shop, day care or familyowned retailer cannot print money when the government decides payroll goes up again. These businesses already live close to the edge. SQ 832 adds another mandated cost and tells them to figure it out.
That’s how small businesses die. Fewer hours. Fewer hires. A summer position disappears. A teenager in a rural town who needed a first job never gets hired.
Nobody pushing SQ 832 wants to talk about what happens inside the pay scale. When the floor rises, the pressure moves through the entire business. If a new employee must start at $15, what happens to the worker who’s been there three years and already makes $15? The person at $17? The manager who took on more responsibility because she was told it would mean something?
They get squeezed. The mandate doesn’t care. SQ 832 punishes the exact workers who did everything right — showed up, stayed loyal, earned their way up — and the people pushing it don’t mention them once. That’s wage compression. For a large corporation, it’s a spreadsheet problem. For a family farm or rural small business, it’s a survival problem.
Supporters of SQ 832 say they care about workers. They leave out the rural kid who needs a first job. They leave out the farm hand whose hours get cut. They leave out everyone who makes the slogan inconvenient. They get the applause. Rural Oklahoma gets the bill.
Oklahoma employers are already competing for workers. Wages are rising because the market is forcing employers to compete through skill, experience, productivity and opportunity. SQ 832 replaces that with government force.
The arrogance of SQ 832 is that it assumes farmers cannot be trusted, small businesses do not matter, rural workers are an afterthought, and Oklahoma’s economy should be run by automatic formula.
That’s wrong. Vote no.
