Eric Garcetti is campaigning to raise the wage in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Marta Evry
The refusal of the Republicans in Congress to commit a fundamental act of decency and raise the federal minimum wage has left state and local governments to take matters into their own hands.
A dozen states have already obliged, and a handful of counties and cities are joining them. Heretofore, the most populous local government to vote to enact a minimum wage in 2014 is San Diego, where the City Council overrode the veto of its Republican mayor to enact an ordinance that will see the minimum wage increase slowly to $11.50 by 2017. Washington DC and Seattle have likewise already adopted increases, and the voters of San Francisco will decide whether to raise the wage during the midterm elections this November. But if Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gets his way, the second-largest city in the country will soon see its lowest-paid workers get a significant increase in their buying power.
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While the city's economy is growing, the poverty rate is far too high: Garcetti estimates that about 27 percent of the city's population lives in the technical definition of poverty. And at a Labor Day event designated as a rally to address poverty in the city, he unveiled a plan to increase the citywide minimum wage to $13.25 per hour by 2017 and index it to inflation in subsequent years. This would represent an increase of over 47 percent when compared to the current minimum wage in California, which is set at $9.00 per hour.
In terms of the number of people this would affect, Los Angeles is not just another local government. If it were a state, its roughly 3.9 million residents would make it more populous than at least 21 others. According to administration estimates, 567,000 workers would see their wages increase as a result of this proposal, resulting in an aggregate injection of $1.89 billion in cumulative take-home pay. And as with any minimum wage increase, there will be upward pressure on wages above the minimum in order to maintain a payscale.
The proposal has received criticism from the usual quarters in various chambers of commerce, who are making the usual claims that raising the wage will increase prices and decrease employment. Garcetti, however, has in his back pocket a study by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley disproving that argument. And even though there will be plenty of money being spent lobbying to defeat any council motion based on this proposal, it would seem to face decent odds: The 15-member City Council is nearly universally Democratic, and from among those, there should be at least eight who will be willing to vote to raise the wage.
Even given those odds, the progressive movement in Los Angeles will have to work hard to prevent this minimum wage increase from being weakened by the lobbying efforts of those who are opposed to lifting our lowest-paid workers out of poverty and giving them a better opportunity at a respectable standard of living.