When Missouri voters were asked last year whether they wanted to increase the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave, 58 percent of them said yes.
Not long after that vote, the Republicans who control the state government mobilized to unwind those changes. On Thursday, Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, signed into law a bill that limited the voter-approved minimum wage increase and scrapped the paid sick leave requirement altogether.
The new law in Missouri reflects the growing impatience of Republican leaders with left-leaning groups that use state ballot questions to circumvent conservative legislatures and bring policy proposals directly to voters. In Missouri, recent ballot questions have restored abortion rights, expanded Medicaid and legalized marijuana, all causes that Democrats generally support, even as Republicans have won statewide elections in landslides.
Liberal groups have used a similar playbook in other Republican-led states that allow ballot questions, leading lawmakers in some places to try to make it harder to place questions on the ballot or to try to increase the threshold needed for a ballot measure to pass. But the move by Missouri Republicans to undo much of a voter-approved measure just months after it passed represented an escalation in the struggle over ballot measures.
“Passing this bill makes a mockery of the democratic process itself,” State Representative Mark Boyko, a Democrat from suburban St. Louis, said during a debate earlier this year.
The changes that voters approved last year established mandatory paid sick leave for Missouri workers and called for raising the state’s minimum hourly wage to $15 in 2026, with increases in subsequent years to be determined by the Consumer Price Index.
Republican lawmakers said they worried those changes would harm business owners and could lead to fewer jobs in the state. Several business groups supported their legislation, which eliminated the paid sick leave requirement and stopped the minimum wage from increasing beyond $15.
State Representative Mitch Boggs, a Republican from southwest Missouri who supported the bill, said that if “we don’t protect our businesses, there’s not going to be a job to go to, to get a minimum wage on.”
“Of course the people voted for it,” said Mr. Boggs, who owns a construction business and a truck wash. “It’d be like asking your teenager if he wanted a checkbook. You know, they’re going to vote for it every time.”
Separate from the legislative push, business groups filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of the ballot question. The Missouri Supreme Court said the election had been proper and declined to invalidate the results.
Missouri lawmakers also passed a measure this year setting a statewide vote on whether to restore an abortion ban. Missouri’s voters enshrined abortion rights in their state Constitution last year, one of several states to do so since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
About half of the states allow citizens to propose new laws, new constitutional amendments or both. In Missouri, the minimum wage and paid sick leave measure was established as a new state law, which legislators are allowed to repeal or change. The abortion vote in Missouri changed the State Constitution, making it harder for lawmakers to undo.
Missouri was not the only state where lawmakers tried this year to roll back voter-approved changes. In Nebraska, the governor signed into law a Republican-backed bill that scaled back a voter-approved paid sick leave requirement. Nebraska legislators did not pass a separate bill introduced by a Democrat that aimed to limit the scope of a voter-approved minimum wage increase. In Alaska, a Republican lawmaker tried to exempt some businesses from a voter-approved paid sick leave requirement, but that measure did not pass.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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