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The state minimum wage in North Carolina is $7.25 an hour, the same as the federal minimum wage. No localities in North Carolina have their own higher minimums. Nor is it likely that they could enact higher minimums even if they wanted to because in North Carolina, the state — not the city or county — generally calls the shots on important matters of local concern.

And yet, the new anti-LBGT law in North Carolina also includes a provision forbidding localities from enacting minimum wages that are higher than the state’s minimum.

The provision is best understood as a bully’s show of force. State legislators fear the growing demand and support for higher wages among low-wage workers and so they have responded with a gratuitous display of the state’s power and intention to keep pay depressed.

The new law in North Carolina is only the latest manifestation of the long-standing Southern antipathy toward minimum wages and other labor protections. There is no state minimum wage in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina or Tennessee; if not for the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, workers in those states would have no minimum-wage protection. In Georgia, the state minimum is $5.15 an hour – a generally moot standard given that the state must abide by federal law, but a sign of official contempt for the state’s lowest-wage workers. In Alabama, the state government recently nullified a law passed last year by the Birmingham city council to establish a city minimum wage of $10.10 by mid-2017.

These are all examples of regressive politics and regressive thinking. And yet, one of the objections to gradually raising the federal minimum $15 an hour is that doing so would be too difficult a lift in the South. Politically, the objection is flawed. It argues, that policymakers should follow the laggards, not the leaders.

It is also flawed as a practical matter. A more constructive approach would be for Southern politicians to acknowledge that wages in the South have been too low for too long and need to rise. But since most of them can’t see that, they need to be shown, by gradually raising the federal minimum to $15.

In the meantime, chronically low pay will persist and with it, high levels of poverty and economic hardship in the South. The five states that do not have state minimum wages are among the poorest in the country.

Poverty has many causes — and one of them is poverty-level wages.