The Ohio Chamber of Commerce is urging voters to "read the fine print" in a proposal on the November ballot to raise the state's minimum wage, warning that the measure has onerous privacy and record-keeping implications.
The Chamber says that so-called "State Issue 2" is not so much about a simple minimum wage increase as it is about "third party access to employee's personal and private wage information, mandating additional onerous record-keeping requirements for employers, promulgating decades of litigation to determine vague and ambiguous language in the amendment, and increasing the minimum wage each year indefinitely."
Tony Fiore, the Chamber's director of labor and human resources policy, warns that the proposal's two pages of fine print would give employees or their representatives "access to personal and private salary records and home addresses."
"Provisions of the measure give third parties broad power to demand the pay records of Ohio employees, including non-minimum wage employees," Fiore said. "This amounts to massive intrusion into the Ohioans' personal privacy."
The additional record-keeping requirements would be burdensome, costly, and make no distinction between those who employ minimum-wage workers and those who do not, Fiore said. The new record-keeping requirements would apply to all Ohio employers, and an employer would be required to provide these confidential records without charge to any employee or the employee representative who requests the information. And there are no limits to the number of requests that can be made.
"This proposed amendment holds true to the old saying, 'The devil's in the details,'" Fiore said. He is urging all Chamber members and their employees to read the entire proposal before voting on November 7.
More information on the proposal - including the official arguments for and against - can be found at http://www.ohiobusinessvotes.org/voterguide/stateissue2.asp.
