Living Wage Ordinance: A Victory for the Working Poor
Tikkun - July 17, 1997
By Richard W. Gillett

A stunning vote by the Los Angeles City Council this past April has given a major boost to cities around the country which may be contemplating living wage legislation as a way to boost the wages of the working poor. The passage of a Living Wage Ordinance, which easily overrode a mayoral veto, was the culmination of a year-long campaign by the Los Angeles Living Wage Coalition. The ordinance mandates a wage of $ 7.25/hr. with health insurance, or $ 8.50/hr. without it, plus 12 paid vacation days. It affects companies with City contracts of $ 25,000 or more, and companies which receive substantial subsidies from the City such as tax breaks, loans or leases on land. Among the approximately 5,000 affected workers are food service workers, security guards, janitorial service workers, and some factory workers.

In passing the ordinance, Los Angeles joins cities such as Baltimore, New York, St. Paul and San Jose, California. But because it contains health care provisions and covers subsidies to companies (the other cities do not), and because a decisive victory for the ordinance occurred despite ferocious business opposition, the Los Angeles ordinance is being seen as a bellwether for other cities. The months-long debate here, widely covered in the press, helped focus attention on an under-appreciated reality: the massive extent of poverty among the working poor, and on the other hand the lucrative deals and tax breaks that many already overly-wealthy companies enjoy at the expense of the City and its taxpayers. For example, to understand the severity that even the federal poverty line represents, consider that in Los Angeles an average two-bedroom house rents for $ 855 a month. After the rent is paid, a family of four at the poverty level has only about $ 450 a month left for all other expenses: food, transportation, clothes, health care and other basics. Fully 35 percent of all workers in the City have incomes below the poverty line. And the working poor in L.A. are getting poorer: from 1979-89 low wage industries here grew by a whopping 40 percent.

In contrast, a survey of City service contracts by the Living Wage Coalition found that profit margins in some contracts are in excess of 35 percent. Furthermore, last year L.A. gave out more that $ 250 million to companies in the form of subsidies and incentives. For example "Dreamworks," the new Hollywood movie consortium formed by Steven Spielberg and others recently received an incentive package of $ 84 million to build a new studio complex.

The coalition widely publicized these disparities in its campaign for the ordinance, reminding the public that taxpayers are getting hit twice: footing the bill for the subsidies paid to such companies, and also paying the cost of social services such as health care and welfare benefits for poor families. And it made a point of bringing affected workers to City Council committee hearings and to meet with council members, a strategy which proved to be very effective.

How did the campaign develop? In late 1995, a small group of activists from the community, organized labor, academia and a group of lawyers, all of whom had political and community experience, began to assemble information from the City of Baltimore's successful passage of a living wage ordinance, and from other cities. Headed by Madeline Janis-Aparicio, a young attorney with political experience and boundless energy, enthusiasm and imagination, they approached an able and progressive ally on the L.A. City Council, Jackie Goldberg. The coalition received grants from foundations, labor unions and Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish groups and hired staff. It began to develop solid and well-researched data on the potential impact of the proposed ordinance on workers, the business community and the city, and began involving key religious leaders early on. Working with the coalition, they founded an interfaith group, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE). Early in 1996 CLUE drew up a theological statement and set about involving the larger religious community.

An early example of the involvement of top leadership was an OpEd piece in the Los Angeles Times in support of the ordinance, co-authored by the Episcopal Bishop of Los Angeles, a prominent rabbi, and a Methodist area bishop. Other support followed, by the American Jewish Congress, by Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahoney, by the Muslim Public Affairs Council and other religious bodies. But the chief religious efforts were grassroots, taking place in concert with the overall lobbying strategies of the coalition.

And to keep the living wage issue growing in the eyes of the public and the press, the coalition used innovative additional strategies such as a winter holiday emphasis to promote the ordinance. Thus at Thanksgiving time over 1,000 paper plates were mailed to the mayor and council, depicting drawings such as a child's Thanksgiving turkey with an inscription such as "Please fill this plate with a living wage." In December a group of coalition members visited each City Council person's office to sing "Living Wage Carols" - holiday carols adapted to lyrics promoting the living wage (the lyrics got quoted in the press, plus a photo). For the New Year, cards saying "Ring in the New Year with a Living Wage" were sent in from around the City. But the most dramatic holiday event was a solemn visit to the mayor's office by actor David Clennon (from TV's "thirtysomething") in the guise of the ghost of Jacob Marley, to warn the mayor against trampling down the poor as Marley and his partner Ebenezer Scrooge had done in life. The mayor was "not in" for "Marley's" visit, despite the presence of a silent procession of 200 people accompanying Clennon as his clanking chains echoed through the corridors of City Hall. It was great theater; a dramatic photo caught the ghost with the mayor (who did turn up shortly in council chambers) and was prominently displayed in the L.A. Times.

Meanwhile the business community was by no means idle. Last fall it formed a "Coalition to Keep L.A. Working," which began to lobby council members intensively, using the press, talk shows and community forums to predict dire consequences should the ordinance pass. It would, they solemnly intoned, result in widespread layoffs of lower paid workers (in order to pay the higher wage mandate), spoil the "business climate" in L.A., and cause businesses to flee to Burbank, Glendale and other cities. With the mayor as their active ally, their group raised over $ 150,000 and employed a consultant to study the ordinance, to demonstrate the adverse effects it would have if passed. But their reliance on out-of-date and grossly over-inflated figures, and even a bit of Red-baiting from the mayor (the ordinance was a socialist scheme, he warned) did not help their cause. Nonetheless most newspapers bought their argument, and the L.A. Times editorialized strongly against it two weeks prior to the Council vote.

It was a surprise to everyone that the vote, when it came, was unanimous. Coalition supporters were packed to the walls of the Council Chambers the day of the vote. "Do the right thing" said the bright green stick-on tags worn by the hundreds of supporters. Indeed, the speeches of many of the Council members prior to the vote appealed to the simple morality of the issue: it simply is not right, if we have the ability, not to provide the workers with whom the City has a contractual relationship, with a living wage.

Ironically, the L.A. Times (despite its own editorial against) published the results of a comprehensive poll two days before the mayor vetoed the ordinance, showing that 70 percent of the voters favored it. His veto was overridden by a vote of 11-1.

What to make of this victory?

First, the solid and sustained participation in this campaign of the mainstream religious community - Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim - is concrete witness that the Christian right cannot presume to speak either for the whole Christian community or for other faiths. It indicates that the enduring religious traditions that sustain our major faiths can, if evoked, speak effectively on behalf of those who have been marginalized and dehumanized by the economic machine of modern - day capitalism. The excesses of business profits, corporate downsizing, an endlessly rising stock market, and the skyrocketing salaries of corporate CEOs are becoming widely perceived by the public as out of control and - to use a word seldom applied to economic policy - immoral. (It's noteworthy in this regard that California last fall passed a proposition raising the state's minimum wage to slightly above the level of the just-passed federal minimum wage.) These basic perceptions seemed to be the backdrop for the religious community's willing entry into the living wage campaign. Moreover, it was rubbing shoulders (many clergy for the first time) with labor unions, workers, community activists, and politicians with a conscience - in itself a very promising development.

Furthermore, there might be an opening here for religious groups to use future living wage campaigns as vehicles to broaden discussion of the responsibility of business to the community beyond that of providing a livable wage.

The living wage victory in L.A. raised the possibility that a real awakening and a willingness to rekindle the fires for a new agenda for justice might be at hand in the form of a promising new partnership of religious faiths with the diverse and progressive sectors of the community, and even with some politicians with a conscience.

Richard W. Gillett is an Episcopal priest in Los Angeles and is a member of the steering committee of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. He has been involved in labor issues for many years.