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Living wage campaigns seek to increase hourly wages for low-skill workers, so that they can maintain a decent standard of living. Since 1994, FACT has funded more than a dozen such campaigns in cities and municipalities around the country. The Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) launched the San Diego Living Wage campaign along with a number of other local organizations such as ACORN, the San Diego Organizing Project, and the childcare, healthcare, and janitorial workers unions. CPI produced several reports documenting growing economic inequality in San Diego, which bolstered organizing and advocacy and helped to rebut data from opponents of the measure.
The council ultimately passed the measure by a narrow 5 – 4 vote. The ordinance raised the minimum wage for employees of city-contracted companies to $10 per hour for employees who also receive medical benefits (or $12 per hour for employees who do not), and indexes future increases to inflation. The new wages phase in over time and apply only to companies in certain industries — such as janitorial services, landscaping, and security — with city contracts exceeding $25,000. Living Wage friends and foes alike claim that this victory signals a watershed moment in San Diego City politics. Previously considered a conservative stronghold, the passage of the ordinance marks an apparent power shift in city politics.
Living wage campaigns began in Baltimore in 1994 when food bank operators noticed that the people they were serving were full-time employees of city contractors. Today, over 125 jurisdictions around the country have addressed the growing economic disparity in the U.S. by enacting laws to increase wages for full-time, low-income workers to a rate closer to the cost of living. Another motivation behind living-wage campaigns is greater accountability for how tax dollars are spent. Most cities offer huge tax breaks to attract new businesses, which usually include low-wage employers that keep families in poverty. Without sufficient income, they are forced to depend on tax-funded public services for their basic needs.
The most definitive study on living wages, published in 2005 by UCLA and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) and entitled “Examining the Evidence,” found that L.A.’s living-wage ordinance had increased pay for an estimated 10,000 low-income workers with a high school education or less, while resulting in minimal job reductions. Eighty-one percent of L.A. firms affected by the living wage did not eliminate jobs. Most recovered some of the wage increases — which averaged 16 percent — through reductions in employee turnover and absenteeism, and many covered the remaining costs by reducing fringe benefits and overtime, hiring more highly trained workers, reducing their profits, and passing on the costs to the city or to the public.
Living Wage campaigns’ natural allies in reducing poverty are Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs). CBAs ensure that economic development projects that receive taxpayer subsidies create new jobs that pay living wages and benefit the community around the project. The first CBAs were negotiated in California in the late 1990s. In 2004, LAANE spearheaded the largest and most comprehensive CBA ever negotiated, a $500 million agreement between the city of Los Angeles, the airport authority, and a coalition of community organizations, unions, environmentalists, and residents as part of the $9 billion expansion of L.A. Airport. The CBA covered a wide range of environmental, labor, health, noise and accountability issues.
Key elements of the agreement include soundproofing all schools affected by airport noise and increasing funding for soundproofing homes; reducing pollution from diesel vehicles and idling airplanes by more than 90 percent; providing training for airport and aviation-related jobs and giving priority to local, low-income, and special needs residents in hiring for them; more opportunities for local, minority-, and women-owned businesses in the modernization; and provisions for community monitoring of LAX to ensure the agreement's enforcement, and LAX’s accountability to the community.
“We have demonstrated that when communities have a place at the table, economic development works better for everyone,” said Rev. William Smart, senior community organizer with LAANE.
The Wall Street Journal called the agreement “the latest sign of the growing coordination among social groups.” The hugely successful and growing living wage and CBA movements are largely the work of various community-based organizations and coalitions around the country, and are an example of how a coalition of educated leaders, savvy advocacy and research, and empowered communities can make a big impact.
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