State Panel Hears Pleas to Raise Minimum Wage

The state Industrial Welfare Commission was warned Friday that its failure to keep California’s minimum wage from falling below the poverty line risks more social eruptions similar to the widespread looting that occurred during the Los Angeles riots.

Nearly 300 people, most of them low-wage immigrant workers from a variety of labor unions, packed a commission hearing downtown, complaining that keeping the minimum wage at $4.25 an hour underscores the widening gulf between the rich and poor of Los Angeles.

“You cannot live in a dignified manner on the minimum wage,” said Alicia Zamora, a garment worker, who said she and her 14-year-old son can no longer afford to rent an apartment and now rent a closet in a home in the Pico-Union district.

She said she pays $70 a month rent for the closet, which she described as large enough for a mattress. Twenty-one people, mostly minimum wage workers, live in the house, she said.

When California last raised its minimum wage in 1988, it was the highest in the nation. Today, seven states plus the District of Columbia have higher minimums, ranging from $4.45 in Rhode Island to $5.25 in the District of Columbia. During that time, the federal minimum wage has increased from $3.35 an hour to $4.25.

An estimated 750,000 California workers, most of them in the service sector, are paid at or near the minimum wage.

A worker with a wife and child and a $4.25-an-hour job--the equivalent of $8,840 a year--falls 24% below the federal poverty standard of $11,570. A family of four on a minimum wage salary falls 36% below the federal standard.

By contrast, in the 1960s and ‘70s, the state minimum wage paid near or above the federal poverty guideline for a family of three.

Gov. Pete Wilson, who appoints members of the Industrial Welfare Commission, has opposed increasing the minimum wage, saying it would encourage businesses to move out of California and result in job losses at businesses that stay. Two of the five seats on the commission are vacant, and two of the three commissioners represent business interests. Only one of them, commission Chairwoman Lynnel Pollock, attended Friday’s hearing.

Labor and anti-poverty activists, who want the minimum wage increased by $1 to $2 an hour, have been trying unsuccessfully for years to pressure the commission to appoint a “wage board” that would study a new minimum wage. It was clear at Friday’s hearing that they hope to use the Los Angeles riots as a political prod.

“You can never escape what happened in Los Angeles,” said John Henning, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation. “The commission can run, but it cannot hide. . . . The people in the streets (during the looting) were the low-wage people, protesting a system that has no place for them. . . . You court such responses by such behavior.”

The most immediate threat to California’s business health “is another explosion because of the economic injustices in California now,” said Maria Elena Durazo, head of the city’s downtown hotel and restaurant union. “The economic despair was what fueled the riots. That’s been increasing over several years. For our statewide economy, we can’t have so many people permanently trapped in poverty.”

“What’s a minimum wage home? It’s where people sleep on the living room floor,” said John Seymour, a Catholic priest who works with immigrant families. Low wages force intolerable overcrowding of homes and apartments, he said.

Minimum wage workers, most of them speaking in Spanish, described life as a bleak, crowded struggle for survival in which medical care and new clothes are not affordable luxuries.

“This is one of the roots of why there is so much drugs and violence and gangs,” said Benito Alvarez, a garment worker who said he cannot afford to bring his son, hospitalized with leukemia, a toy. “There have been moments when I’ve thought about stealing because my family needs things.”

Several spokesmen for the restaurant industry urged the commission not to raise the minimum wage, saying it would force them to lay off some workers or cut hours.

“Forty hours at $4.25 an hour is a hell of a lot better than zero hours at $5.25,” said San Diego restaurant manager Brad Wood.

Business lobbyists have long argued that raising minimum wages only cuts employment. A recent study suggests that many of the working poor are hurt by wage increases because they lose eligibility for some government programs.

A Princeton University study last year found that minimum wage-level employment in California did not decrease after the state raised its minimum wage in 1988, and that teen-age employment actually increased.

Advocates of increasing the minimum wage say that if the wage had kept pace with the federal poverty line since 1968, when the wage was $1.65 an hour, it would now be $6.83.