On the same day - May Day, International Workers Day - that Seattle's Mayor announced support for a proposal that would eventually push the minimum wage to $15 per hour in Washington's largest city, the Berkeley, California City Council entertained in special session a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15/hr by 2020 for most employers.
Under the new suggested rollout, Berkeley's minimum wage would be increased from $9 to $10 an hour on Aug. 1 this year. (A state mandated rise from $8 to $9 an hour goes into effect on July 1, 2014 regardless of the city's decision.) Then it would go up every year in increments until it reached $15.25 - at which point it would align with the city's living wage of $15.02 - on Jan. 1, 2020.
A month ago San Francisco labor and activist groups unveiled a ballot initiative that would raise the minimum wage - already the highest big-city wage in the nation - to $15 by 2017.
Under SEIU's proposal, companies with more than 100 employees would have until 2016 to raise wages to $15 an hour. They must lift base wages to $13 an hour by January, the proposal says. The measure would cover all part-time, temporary and contract employees.
Businesses with fewer than 100 employees would have until 2017 to lift wages to $15 an hour. But they must raise wages to $13 an hour by 2015 and $14 by 2016, according to the proposal.
In Oakland, the situation is more complicated. Last year's marches (see left) have given way to a ballot initiative now circulating to put an immediate $12.25/hr minimum wage on the ballot for November which woul include paid sick leave and cost of living adjustments. (Assuming an average cost of living adjustment of 1.5% per year that would translate to a $13.20/hr minimum wage in 2020; assuming a 2.0% COLA would get Oakland to a $13.52/hr wage by that date.)
Dan Siegel, one of the sixteen (!) human candidates for Mayor of Oakland, described by the East Bay Express as
... the only true progressive among the major candidates in the race...
has been consistent in insisting that a living wage of $15/hr is a bare minimum for people to live in Oakland, and is demanded by any sense of social and economic justice.
This Fight for $15? Definitely. Absolutely. A $15 minimum wage within a week of me becoming Mayor, or as soon as I can get the Council to vote.
On April 29th, Siegel testified before the City Council Committee on Economic
Development. The Committee was considering an abysmal proposal by Councilperson Larry Reid to hike the minimum wage to $10.20/hr, and Siegel politely requested that the proposal be amended to $15/hr. Listen.
.. I would like to applaud Council member Reid for presenting this proposal for your consideration. But I'm here to ask one of the members of he Council to amend Chairman Reid's proposal to make the minimum wage $15/hr.
... The analysis prepared by your own City staff says that a living wage for a family of four in Oakland is approximately $86,000 per year... According to your own report, that means that if you have two wage earners in this family of four they would have to have a minimum wage of $20/hr each...
We all share a commitment to the welfare of the people of Oakland. We also, I believe, share an understanding, that the problems that we're facing in Oakland, whether its a high crime rate, substance abuse, poor housing, unemployment, or inability of young people to succeed in school... are to a very large extent a function of poverty.
So we need to have a wage policy in Oakland that will allow workers to get away from a life of poverty, and will allow them to prosper and be productive citizens of society.
...the other piece of this is that ... even with $10 ... we are all subsidizing companies like McDonalds and Walmart, whose workers earn so little money that they end up being on welfare, qualifying for Section 8 housing, getting Medical and Medicaid and so on, and that just does not make sense to me.
Let's have a living wage, not just a poverty wage.
What will happen between now and November in Oakland in the battle to raise the minimum wage should be interesting.
One possibility could be that some brave Councilperson that wants to stand up for Oakland's low-wage workers and their families puts a $15/hr minimum wage proposal on the City Council agenda. (Don't hold your breath.)
Another direction could be for a push, as the Mayor of Berkeley, Tom Bates, has proposed, to adopt ordinances similar to Berkeley's across the entire East Bay, and thus in Oakland. This is a clever ruse, because, of course, there is no way to hike the minimum wage simultaneously in multiple cities - some municipality will have to go first, and they will all insist on waiting for others to act.
Another, as author Scott Jay writes based on emails from Public Records requests, could be a scheme by some elements of the $12.25 Coalition, the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and various Council people - including some who claim to support the $12.25 ballot initiative or even the Fight for $15 - to water down the $12.25 proposal significantly, then have the City Council enact such a diluted proposal into law. This would put a serious damper on efforts to pass the $12.25 ballot initiative in November should it make it onto the ballot.
A public records request to Oakland city hall has revealed that Lift Up Oakland representatives have been quietly meeting with Oakland City Council members to discuss an alternative minimum wage plan since early February. This plan would have the Oakland City Council use its power to put a minimum wage initiative on the ballot, circumventing the signature gathering campaign currently underway. It has been suggested the Council's proposed ballot measure could be even weaker than the one currently proposed by labor groups.
All this intrigue is, well, intriguing. But it denies the reality that every month that Oakland's minimum and low wage earners go without a wage hike is another month that they continue to live in poverty, in many cases going deeper in debt while watching their rents skyrocket. The median rent in Oakland has increased from $1395/month to $1695/month, a $300 increase, in a single year. And it's hard to rent anything bigger than a doghouse for less than $1000/month, a rate which a minimum wage earner cannot possibly afford to pay and not starve.
The Oakland City Council should stop the bullshit and pass an immediate hike in the minimum wage to $15 for big businesses and a three-year phased-in approach for small businesses, as was proposed by the 15Now Coalition in Seattle and is being pushed in San Francisco.
That instead the best they could do is table Reid's $10.20 proposal "until further research is done" is indicative of just how fervently they believe, or convince themselves they believe, the Ferengi Chamber of Commerce's mantra
Greed is eternal.
as CoC's representatives and those of the Restaurant Association gnash their teeth, fortelling the doom of Oakland should the cost of a hamburger go up a few dimes.
It will be a sad day in certain Arkansas households when Walmart has to pay their workers a decent wage across the Bay Area but that day is coming. And it will portend a movement across much of the United States to demand nothing less.