LIVING
WAGE COALITION OF SONOMA COUNTYPhone: 707-623-7395
Email: mml@ap.net
PO Box 427
Santa Rosa, CA 95402
LIVING WAGE COALITION IN THE NEWS
Living Wage Comes of Age
by BOBBI MURRAY
The Nation
July 23, 2001
When the nation's first living-wage ordinance passed in Baltimore in 1994--a
modest measure that improved the earnings of just 1,500 workers--few could have
predicted that a powerful national movement would emerge in its wake. In the
ensuing seven years, more than sixty municipalities, pushed by coalitions of
local activists, have passed living-wage laws, and some seventy-two campaigns
are rolling forward around the country, from New York City to the right-to-work
South, not to mention at Harvard University, where students concluded a
high-profile living-wage sit-in in May.
It's an increasingly sophisticated movement that uses a tool chest of tactics,
from lobbying to postcard campaigns to economic impact studies, to win its
goals. Activists putting together new campaigns need not reinvent the wheel: Jen
Kern, of the Living Wage Resource Center, established by ACORN, travels
regularly to offer advice, gleaned from ACORN living-wage fights, to fledgling
campaigns, while organizers from across the country traveled to Los Angeles in
early June for discussions with the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE),
considered by many to be one of the nation's state-of-the-art economic justice
organizations. LAANE helped pass one of the country's most comprehensive local
living-wage laws in 1997, launched the cutting-edge ordinance passed in Santa
Monica in May and was part of a landmark deal, also concluded in May, with the
developers of the mammoth Staples Center expansion [see sidebar, "Unite and
Conquer."].
Something as seemingly tame as a local ordinance would hardly seem to stoke the
fires of political passion, especially since the majority of living-wage
measures are so limited. Most apply only to companies that receive city
subsidies and/or contracts, requiring them to pay employees a wage that lifts a
family above the poverty level. Even in big cities, that can mean small
numbers--roughly 7,000 in Los Angeles, a city of 3.7 million; 30,000 in San
Francisco, where an ambitious ordinance was signed into law by Mayor Willie
Brown in September 2000. In smaller towns, the numbers are even lower. In
Lexington, Kentucky, proponents hope to cover about 150 sanitation workers.
Nationally, living-wage legislation may affect as few as 100,000 workers
overall.
But paradoxically, the limits of the ordinances are part of their strength as an
organizing vehicle--attaching strings to public moneys is a more politically
palatable first step than more complex demands, and the few campaigns that have
won more ambitious measures built up to those victories from a modest beginning.
The organizing possibilities are what makes the living-wage movement so
promising: One of the first rules of good organizing is to set a winnable goal,
with the idea that the first victory builds an organization and leads to others.
"The whole idea of the living wage is in the culture now," says Robert Pollin of
the department of economics and the Political Economy Research Institute at the
University of Massachusetts. The community-based living-wage movement springs
from the same source as the campus-based antisweatshop movement. "What people
are starting to see is that it's the same movement--it's about living standards
for workers," says Pollin. The living wage concept relies on a simple moral
imperative: People who work full time should not be forced to survive at or
below the poverty line.
It's a tough idea to dismiss. City officials in LA were aghast to learn in the
course of the living-wage campaign there that the company with the contract to
clean the gleaming landmark Central Library downtown paid its janitors minimum
wage without health insurance or paid sick days. An anecdote from a Virginia
living-wage organizer may be even more telling--when he asked a worker what he
was going to do with the extra money after Alexandria passed an ordinance, the
man replied, "Quit my third job."
Underpinning it all is the demise of the social safety net after welfare reform,
as well as the economic reality of the shrinking minimum wage. "From 1968 until
today, worker productivity has gone up 60 percent, while the minimum wage has
fallen by 35 percent," says Pollin. "The fundamental motivation behind the
living-wage movement is the collapse of the minimum wage."
Aware that living-wage laws have traditionally had a narrow scope, some
activists are now seeking to stretch their boundaries beyond companies that
receive direct city subsidies. In New Orleans, a coalition led by the Greater
New Orleans AFL-CIO, ACORN and Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Local 100 has been battling for close to five years to pass a measure that would
establish a wage floor of one dollar above the minimum throughout the city. It
would cover some 50,000 employees, many of whom are tourism workers, in a state
that has the second highest proportion of people working for minimum wage in the
country, according to chief organizer and 23-year labor movement veteran Wade
Rathke. The matter will go before New Orleans voters in February 2002, after
what Rathke calls "numerous efforts to sidetrack it legally and
politically"--including official finagling to negate 30,000 qualifying ballot
signatures, that was met by a successful lawsuit by ACORN and its allies.
Across the country and farther north, California's East Bay Alliance for a
Sustainable Economy--EBASE--has fought to expand the parameters of the living
wage with the argument that businesses that benefit even indirectly from public
development efforts should pay decently. EBASE won ordinances in Oakland and
Berkeley that link living-wage conditions to subsidies and contracts, but the
Berkeley ordinance goes further: It includes any business located in the
lucrative Marina zone with six-plus employees and $350,000 in gross revenues.
City investment, argues EBASE co-director Amaha Kassa, has made those businesses
particularly profitable, even if they don't hold a city contract or benefit from
direct subsidies.
Down the California coast, in the seaside city of Santa Monica, the living-wage
coalition Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART) won its May
victory after making a similar argument. The zone-based proposal will cover a
1.5-square-mile area along the city's tony beachfront, mandating a wage of
$10.50 an hour with benefits. Although the City Council voted for the ordinance
on May 23, SMART knows the fight is far from over--the opposition fired another
shot across the bow just weeks after the ordinance prevailed, filing papers to
launch a referendum against the measure.
It's yet another sophisticated tactic by an especially wily opposition, and the
second attack at the ballot box. Last fall, the management of five beachfront
luxury hotels joined together to finance and promote a phony living-wage measure
on the November city ballot. The measure, Proposition KK, was supported by a
paper coalition, called Santa Monicans for a Living Wage. But KK would have
affected as few as sixty-two workers--and would have prohibited the City Council
from enacting wage legislation, in effect squashing the SMART-backed zone
proposal. SMART beat back the effort by mobilizing an army of precinct walkers
that included union activists fighting to organize hotels in Santa Monica and
labor activists from adjacent Los Angeles, along with the Santa Monica renters'
rights alliance that passed the city's cutting-edge rent-control measure in 1978
and has maintained a voice in local politics ever since.
Organizers should nonetheless approach a zone-based ordinance with caution,
warns Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director of LAANE, which helped launch
the Santa Monica campaign. "It's really hard to win; it takes a long time, a
sustained effort against huge opposition," she says.
Opposition attacks have occasionally taken the form of legal action. In Santa
Monica, one of the lead opposition hotels, represented by LA's high-powered
downtown law firm Latham & Watkins, has vowed to sue. In Berkeley, a business in
the Marina zone, Skates by the Bay--owned by parent corporation Restaurants
Unlimited, which specializes in high-end restaurants--has sued the city to
overturn the ordinance, with a summary judgment expected this summer. Critics of
zone-based proposals argue that they violate equal protection guarantees by
singling out businesses within a certain area. The challenge facing activists is
to prove that the city had good reason to make a distinction between businesses
within and outside the designated living-wage zones.
Another legal argument against living wage ordinances is that they are
minimum-wage laws, and therefore out of local hands. Opponents are taking this
tack in St. Louis, where a living-wage measure that passed with 77 percent of
the vote last summer has been challenged by nonprofits and industry trade
groups. Paul Sonn of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University
School of Law, who is defending the city, counters that "when you subject
subsidies to living-wage laws, you're saying the city is going to target its
subsidy dollars to living-wage jobs--that's a different thing than regulating
the labor market."
With these notable exceptions, lawsuits are not yet a common opposition tactic,
but they can nonetheless bog down a campaign. "The problem with litigation,"
says Rathke of the New Orleans campaign, "is that it moves something from the
front page to the back page." New Orleans organizers stayed busy, launching an
education push among community groups, churches and in schools to lay the
groundwork for the February 2002 elections. All the City Council seats will be
open in that election as well, so the campaign has focused on pressing each
candidate for a commitment to the living wage.
The New Orleans campaign is significant for the scale of its proposed coverage,
but also as a harbinger of a new trend in the living-wage movement. "The
living-wage movement is moving into areas that aren't traditional 'gimmes'--it's
moving into tougher fights.... You find more [campaigns] now in the
traditionally antilabor bastion of the Southern United States," notes David
Reynolds, professor of labor studies at Wayne State University and author of
ACORN's Living Wage Campaigns handbook. He cites efforts under way in
Gainesville, Florida; Greensboro, North Carolina; Dallas, Texas; and Knoxville
and Nashville, Tennessee. The movement has also made its way into smaller towns,
like Lexington, Kentucky, with 260,000 residents. In the South, where many
states are right-to-work, a living-wage campaign is a way to obtain
collective-bargaining-type protections.
In Alexandria, Virginia, a town of 130,000, activists built an aggressive
prolabor coalition to pass a living-wage ordinance in June 2000 to require
contractors for food services, parking attendants and janitors to pay a minimum
of $9.84 an hour. Alexandria is the sixteenth-richest city in the country; one
of ten households makes more than $100,000 a year. But according to organizer
Gyula Nagy of Alexandria's living-wage coalition, "One out of five kids lives in
poverty. There's this huge disparity between a big middle class and black and
Latino service workers."
Nagy says the effort began with "a scrappy little kickass group" called the
Tenants' and Workers' Support Committee, which formed in 1986 to fight mass
evictions from low-rent housing. The campaign eventually included eighteen
unions and seven congregations and brought together clergy and labor in a new
alliance, combining face-to-face lobbying with rallies, door-knocking and
leafleting.
After the law passed, Virginia activists got a sample of an ominous trend: The
Alexandria business community tried to block it at the state level, successfully
pressing the Virginia state legislature to pass a measure banning a local living
wage. The Alexandria City Council, pushed by the coalition, prevailed on the
legislature to allow local control. "There's still a remote chance that the
state legislature could perform a midnight massacre," says Nagy. "It appears
that this may be a strategy of the Chambers of Commerce to fight back--they see
we're winning, and they're having a hard time defeating us at the city level."
ACORN's Jen Kern and Wayne State's David Reynolds confirm that living-wage
opponents have increasingly sought to sandbag the movement in state
legislatures.
Michigan has only a few legislators holding the line against a measure that
would gut the ordinances in seven Michigan municipalities, including Detroit. As
is true in other states, organized labor is playing a key role in the debate.
Michigan AFL-CIO president Mark Gaffney says, "When the legislators were at home
here we had groups of workers meet with them. One guy said he wouldn't oppose
[the state anti-wage legislation] because living wage wasn't in his district--so
we put it on the ballot three places in his district." The legislator turned
around.
On the other hand, state laws banning local living-wage ordinances have passed
in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, Utah and, in June, Oregon. Kern
nonetheless makes the sunny observation that such battles provide an opportunity
to organize around economic justice--the real point, she says, of living-wage
fights. Utah's activists, for example, lost the living-wage battle--but only
after they mobilized their city councils to lobby state officials; conducted
delegations to state officials themselves; wrote and placed editorials on the
living wage and local control and staged a rally at the capital. Activists are
now strategizing on how to move their progressive program forward on other
fronts. "Utah just saw more economic justice activity at the state level than
ever before," says Kern.
The living-wage movement's opposition, of course, continues to organize as well.
The industry-funded Employment Policies Institute in Washington, DC, sponsored a
June seminar on the subject that featured an array of guests known for
living-wage bashing. In an interview, institute spokesman John Doyle began a
summary of objections to the living-wage concept with the argument that higher
wages entice skilled workers into the work force to compete with the low-skilled
workers now holding jobs--suggesting that a living wage would actually hurt the
people that proponents are trying to help.
Economist Pollin responds that there are only small differences between groups
of workers at low wage levels, noting wryly that the institute's arguments have
shifted toward the kinder, gentler, living-wage-laws-hurt-the-workers argument,
and away from those trotted out by opponents when he first conducted living-wage
studies in 1997. "The notion that large industries are moving out of cities has
been laid to rest...they can't say that it would close down businesses," he
says.
Now that the movement is old enough to have veterans, organizers have someplace
to go for counsel, which can be summed up with this advice: When you're blocked
on one front, find another opening and keep moving. As Pollin says, "The point
is, it's an organizing tool."
LIVING
WAGE COALITION OF SONOMA COUNTY
Phone: 707-623-7395
Email: mml@ap.net
PO Box 427
Santa Rosa, CA 95402