Alabama’s governor has signed a bill that prevents cities from setting their own minimum wage.
Governor Robert Bentley signed the bill in to law shortly after the State Senate approved it by more than 2-to-1 vote. The majority of the votes fell along party lines.
Republican lawmakers supported the bill that will block the Birmingham City Council, which voted to increase their city’s minimum wage to $10.10. That minimum wage hike set to go in to effect on Monday.
Mountain Brook Republican Rep. David Faulkner introduced the bill. He says the legislation will maintain uniformity across the state. He believes it would be a "burden on businesses" to allow hundreds of different minimum wages across the state.
Mobile area high school students are learning what a career in healthcare might be like. The thirteenth annual Health Occupations Career Fair is set to wrap up today.
The Bay Area Healthcare Coalition and the mobile area chamber of commerce are teaming up on the event. More than seven hundred tenth graders from ten schools in the mobile and Baldwin county area are participating.
Emily McGraff is the director of education for the chamber. She says the event includes hand-on exhibits…
“They will go through fifteen different exhibits that are all healthcare related so for example we will have an orthopedics exhibit that is run by the Alabama orthopedic clinic we will have volunteers from that clinic they are not just handing the students a pencil and letting them go on their way they’re actually have the students put splints on each other’s thumbs.”
The goal of the event is to get high schoolers thinking early if they want to pursue a career in health care.
Black History month is drawing to a close. But there are a number of commemorative events in the next few days.
The Wenonah High School Choir will present a concert of Negro spirituals at the Birmingham Public Library on Sunday. Black history month also included the unveiling of a new mural at the Rufus A. Lewis Library in Montgomery. Artist Bill Ford used imagery from the Montgomery bus boycotts and “bloody Sunday” in Selma.
Library director Juanita Owes says the mural helps show the continued impact of the civil rights movement today.
“Had it not been for Rosa Parks not giving her seat up and Martin Luther King being the non-violent leader that he was, we would never have gotten to 2015 with Barack Obama as the first President of the United States of color.”
The city of Selma will hold its 51st annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee starting a week from today. The event remembers when voting rights marchers were attacked by state troopers in 1965.