How state governments perpetuate inequality

Something remarkable happened last Thursday: a filibuster-proof majority of senators voted to get the ball rolling on paid sick leave. Specifically, they amended the Senate's budget resolution, calling for a "deficit-neutral reserve fund for legislation to allow Americans to earn paid sick time."

Now, budget resolutions aren't laws, but rather declarations by the legislature of what it intends to do. And even if the Senate follows through, there's still the House. But the resolution's passage — with 14 Republican backers, no less — is strong evidence that votes are building for some kind of national movement on the issue.

Here's the wrinkle: Paid sick leave has been gaining ground at the local level as well as the national level. But in a weird little three-step, it's been getting rolled back at the state level. And it's the GOP doing the rolling.

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Recently, a whole hodgepodge of city governments required employers to offer their workers at least a few paid sick days a year. At the same time, a raft of GOP-controlled state legislatures began bringing their cities to heel with laws banning those same local ordinances. As of February, 11 states had pre-empted their local governments, eight of them since 2013, and all of them thoroughly controlled by Republicans.

The pattern continues elsewhere: Oklahoma banned its local governments from hiking the minimum wage, Montana is gearing up to, and Missouri Republicans are getting ready to ban both types of ordinances.

Cities in Texas have been banning plastic bags, fracking, and tree-cutting — and that state's governor-elect, Greg Abbott, wants to squash it all.

Proponents of the state bans argue that city-to-city patchworks are bad for businesses, but conveniently the consistence standard for minimum wages and paid sick leave they want applied everywhere is "nothing."

Then there's occupational licensing and other regulations — again at the state level — that lock small businesses and other newcomers out of sectors like hair-styling, dentistry, and auto retail. Multiple studies have concluded that the public benefits of these rules are often scant. But they do protect established businesses while pushing up costs and pushing down wages, often to the detriment of poorer Americans.

To their credit, a number of conservative commentators and politicians have called attention to the problem, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has even gestured at reform. But his proposals were scant and half-hearted. That's probably because a serious push for reform would set the GOP at war with itself: As Josh Barro noted, blue states like California, Illinois, and New York offer more freedom in auto retail than Texas or Georgia. The Republicans in Florida's Senate preserved licensing requirements for interior designers, and it's mostly red states with laws restricting coffin sales.

At the state level, the supposedly local-control-and-free-market-friendly GOP has been as bad as anyone about protectionist sops to business interests. If you include banning minimum wage and paid sick leave ordinances in those sops — and you absolutely should — the GOP is arguably worse. What's going on here?

There are a few things to keep in mind, starting with the class composition of the two parties. The notion that the Republicans are the working class party, while popular in certain circles, is wrong.

Roughly speaking, the Republicans are the party for people in the upper half of the income distribution who are socially conservative. The Democrats are the party for people in the upper half who are socially liberal, and everyone in the lower half.

Furthermore, the GOP's Tea Party base is made up of a pretty particular type: well-paid but not insanely rich professionals and small business owners with power over a modest pool of employees. They're elites, but within a smaller socioeconomic pond — what Michael Lind called the "local notables." These are the people who state legislators will listen to, but who can get drowned out at the national level. They also have the most to gain from preventing minimum wage hikes and paid sick leave laws, and from regulatory protectionism that squelches competition at the state level.

And at the state level it's a lot easier for them to get what they want, since state-level politics tends to fly under the radar of the media, the money sloshing around is not nearly as gargantuan as at the federal level, and state regulatory apparatuses are smaller. In short, state governments are probably just a lot easier for them to capture and buy off.

Meanwhile, movements to protect and lift up everyday workers and other less-powerful Americans have one great advantage: numbers. Which can usually only be brought to bear at scale — i.e. national politics. Think of the Civil Rights Movement: Jim Crow and segregation were state projects, while the Civil Rights Act and the accompanying Justice Department crackdowns were national projects.

Finally, the big corporate interests who are the major players at the national level certainly don't like minimum wage hikes and paid sick leave and empowered workers and environmental regulations and local bans on fracking and plastic bags and such. But they have the size and the standing to tolerate them as inconveniences in a way the local notables won't.

So that probably explains why we're seeing crackdowns on paid sick leave in Republican states, but turns towards it at the national level.

But what about the cities? Here, geographic and social trends probably play a big role. Republicans like suburbs and rural living, and Democrats like their urban hubs. The big metropolitan areas where the minimum wage and paid sick leave ordinances are passing are where the Democratic coalition of poorer Americans and upper class social liberals is most heavily concentrated. So, within their jurisdictions, they're probably able to overcome the broader hostility that characterizes their states as a whole.

The local, state, and national three-step is an interesting dynamic born of class politics, party coalitions, and even the geographic sorting of populations. But once you unpack it, it's also a reminder of who's still willing to hear the needs and concerns of less powerful Americans, and who is not.