St. Louis' minimum wage has reverted to $7.70 because of opposition from Gov. Eric Greitens to a brief increase to $10.

Greitens announced the reversal in July, arguing that the increase would kill jobs.

"Despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people's pockets," he said, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

St. Louis passed an ordinance in 2015 mandating that the city's minimum wage increase to $10 by 2017. A court battle between Missouri's state legislature and the city of St. Louis ensued, with the city's minimum wage eventually rising to $10 in May of this year.

That wage was slated to increase further to $11 an hour next January. Greitens, however, supported a recent bill in the Missouri legislature that prohibited cities from creating a different minimum wage from the statewide one.

The new law went into effect Monday, putting about 35,000 people who benefited from the increase to $10 at risk of a pay cut.

Outside Missouri, many states are looking to increase their minimum wage. Last March, Gov. Jerry Brown of California agreed to raise the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022. Many US cities have plans to hit the same rate even earlier.

Greitens' claim that raising the minimum wage would "kill jobs" is not supported by economic research. The National Employment Law Project released an exhaustive report in 2016 looking at every federal minimum-wage hike since 1938. The investigators found that year-over-year employment increased 68% of the time after a wage hike. What's more, the industries most affected by minimum wage more often saw jumps in employment: 73% of the time in retail and 82% in leisure and hospitality.

"These basic economic indicators show no correlation between federal minimum-wage increases and lower employment levels," the authors wrote. The only times when minimum-wage increases correlated to a decline in employment were during or near recessions. In most other cases, there was a neutral or positive relationship.

When it was created in 1938, the US federal minimum wage was 25 cents. As a percentage of gross domestic product per capita, that would equate to a wage of about $20 an hour today.

Some local business owners in St. Louis welcomed the wage cutback, but other St. Louis residents lamented the loss of that extra cash each month.

"If we're making $10 an hour, we're going to go right back out and spend that money," Wanda Roberts, a St. Louis minimum-wage worker, told CBS News. With the reversal, she said, she'd "go back to struggling."