Push to raise wages growing
California cities, counties lead nation in passing laws increasing minimum pay
LANCASTER — Lydia Flores saves gas money by taking a twohour train ride to and from her cashier job at a Los Angeles supermarket. She tells her teenage sons about another way the family can save on the cost of eggs.
“‘Eat it slow,’ ” she tells them. “They gotta savor their eggs now.”
To stretch her dollars, Flores gets some food from churches. Her sons wear their uncle’s hand-me-downs. A couple of times a year, she’ll ask a local nonprofit to help pay a utility bill. “You pay one bill and leave the other,” she said. “And then, you’ll get the disconnection notice, and then you pay that bill, and then leave another bill.”
Earning $12.88 an hour, Flores supports her two sons on roughly $2,000 a month or less after taxes. That includes a Social Security check her youngest son receives because of a developmental disability.
It’s stories like Flores’ — of people who work full time and still struggle to meet basic needs — that have fueled groups such as Fight for $15 and the movement to raise wages. California cities have heard their call.
In the last three years, 14 of the 29 cities and counties nationwide that have voted to increase the minimum wage have been in California, according to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research.
“California is a state that has made it very clear to cities and counties that they have the authority to pass a higher minimum wage,” said Laura Huizar, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that publishes research about low-wage workers.
Huizar said some states — Georgia and Texas, for example — prohibit localities from passing minimum wage laws.
Other experts say a mix of politics and economics explain why 48 percent of the recent local in-
creases have happened through California regional governments. Andrew Busch, of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, says it’s the left-leaning politics and high cost of living in the state.
“Policymakers or voters are more receptive to an increased minimum wage because they see that it just costs a lot more to live in those places,” he said.
Leaders of the Fight for $15 movement say getting traction on the city level hasn’t necessarily been the focus of their campaign. It is one of many groups that organized to raise the minimum wage in Los Angeles. But leaders say their demonstrations have influenced New York state policymakers and employers.
“There’s all types of ways to get there, and I don’t think that the workers really care how they get there, they care that they have $15 so they can get out of poverty,” said Kendall Fells, organizing director for the Fight for $15.
Nonetheless, actions by the California cities could prove influential.
California raised the minimum wage from $8 to $9 an hour in July 2014. And beginning Jan. 1 it will be go up to $10 an hour. Large cities in the Los Angeles and Bay Area — including San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco — have passed ordinances to raise the minimum.
San Jose’s minimum wage, now $10.15 an hour, will go up to $10.30 an hour on Jan. 1. Oakland’s hourly minimum, now at $12.25, goes up to $12.55 the first of the year. San Francisco’s hourly minimum, now $12.25, will be gradually increased to $15 by July 2018.
Busch said if enough cities adopt an increase, there may be a “psychological momentum” to adopt similar increases statewide.
“They might begin to make the argument that there are too many cities at risk of losing jobs to competitor cities, and the playing field needs to be leveled out,” Busch said.
Indeed, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who authored a bill this year to raise the minimum statewide to $13 with future adjustments for inflation, said higher wages in cities create an opportunity for state policy to make the marketplace fairer for competing businesses.
“Raising our state minimum wage to be a little closer to some of these higher city and county minimum wages would do that,” Leno said.
Furthermore, Leno said, if cities show that local wage increases don’t “kill jobs,” that would help proponents of the statewide measure.
But the wave of new local wage ordinances has California employers concerned. The California Business Roundtable hasn’t yet taken a stance on the statewide wage proposals. But Robert Lapsley, president of the round-table, said minimum wage decisions should be decided in the state Capitol, with regional economic differences taken into account.
“How do you make good public policy if you’re doing it solely within one city when it’s going to have ripple effects throughout the entire region?” Lapsley asked.
While proponents of this year’s statewide legislation want to raise the minimum wage so that families of three or four people stay out of poverty, Lapsley argued that that’s something the minimum wage was never intended to do.
“That’s the wrong debate,” he said. “It’s really about we have to be growing our jobs so that we have middle-class jobs.”
Instead, Lapsley said, the business community wants to see the manufacturing sector grow to create more opportunities for Californians to transition out of lower paying jobs.
The $13 minimum wage bill stalled in committee this year, but Leno said he will reignite the push in 2016. The wave of cities raising their minimum wages wasn’t the impetus for his effort, Leno said, but the local efforts “inspire and encourage” the statewide legislation.
Meanwhile, a couple of 2016 ballot proposals would set the state minimum wage at $15 an hour, one by 2020 and the other by 2021. Neither has yet qualified for the ballot.
Busch said efforts to raise the wage at the local level may give those initiatives momentum, but backers will still need to show voters that the increase wouldn’t hurt the economy.
That $15 minimum wage in Los Angeles couldn’t come soon enough for Flores, who works in an area supermarket. When her pay is increased, she said, she will finally be able to buy her two sons new clothes.
“Couldn’t they raise it right now?” she asked.