Tighter Rules Proposed for Living Wage Law

Frustrated that persuasion hasn’t worked, a key City Council panel agreed Thursday to make the first substantial changes to the city’s controversial living wage ordinance aimed at forcing municipal contractors to abide by the law or face stricter penalties.

While the amendments apply to all city contractors, the changes are geared specifically toward airline contractors, who mostly have found a way around paying airport workers increased pay and benefits. The proposed changes must be approved by the full council and also would require Mayor Richard Riordan’s approval.

While Riordan has said he has encouraged the airlines to require their contractors to pay a living wage to scores of airport baggage screeners, maintenance workers and others, he also has said the statute shouldn’t be imposed on the airlines.

Nonetheless, City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who championed the living wage law, said the council intended to cover the potentially thousands of airport workers when the ordinance was approved last year.

When she and others realized that the airlines found ways to avoid requiring their contractors to pay these workers a living wage, she sought changes to more clearly extend coverage to the airline contractors and to strengthen enforcement.

“You fire an arrow, you think you hit the target,” Goldberg said. “We want to be sure we’re hitting the right people.”

At a meeting of the council’s personnel committee, chaired by Goldberg, it was revealed that about 750 workers have received raises and benefits, leaving a couple of thousand still uncovered by the law.

UCLA professor Richard Sander, who was hired by the city to review implementation of the law, said he believes too many exemptions to the statute have been granted to contractors.

“The problem is, we still think there’s a big gap between the number of workers who are covered and the number of workers who should be covered,” Sander said. “We feel that exemptions are being made on . . . a wholesale basis.”

But Sander said he has found better compliance overall with the law since his last review in May. He said the ordinance is having more than “a trivial impact” in the city, but he raised concerns about the city’s Bureau of Contract Administration’s enforcement of the statute.

Madeline Janis-Aparicio, director of the Los Angeles Living Wage Coalition, which pushed for the law and is monitoring its application, said the group also has “grave misgivings” about the contract bureau’s enforcement ability. That agency, she said, is overly bureaucratic, leaving too many employees underpaid.

Bernard Gilpin, who heads the contract bureau, defended his department’s oversight of the law, but said he would support clarifications to it to ensure better compliance.

“Clearly, we need to get rid of the ambiguity in the ordinance,” Gilpin said.

The living wage law was vetoed by the mayor last year, only to be overridden by the council. It requires municipal contractors to pay workers $7.25 an hour with specified benefits or $8.50 without benefits.

Under the changes approved by the two-member personnel committee Thursday, contractors could be disqualified if they are found to be violating the law and, ultimately, the city could pursue legal action. One provision calls for contractors to be charged $100 per day per employee if they fail to meet the law after being cautioned.

It remained unclear Thursday if the mayor would veto changes to the law if the full council adopts them.

The mayor “does not believe that government should dictate economics,” said Noelia Rodriguez, Riordan’s spokeswoman. “The competitive marketplace does that in a free economic environment.”

Further, she said requiring the contractors to pay a living wage could be interpreted as a new tax on businesses--a concept the mayor opposes.

In an attempt to dramatize their efforts, living wage activists staged a kind of street theater at City Hall Thursday. The play, “LAX Confidential: A Story of Greed, Abuse of Power and Injustice,” was a reenactment--albeit highly overacted--of an incident earlier this month in which a woman went through the electronic screening device with a gun in her bag and entered the boarding area.

The “actors,” who called themselves the “Not Ready for Low Wage Players,” said they wanted to show that the $5.75-an-hour baggage checkers, wheelchair attendants and others at Los Angeles International and Ontario airports are working in important and potentially life-threatening jobs.

In a passionate speech before the council panel, Dionicia Robinson, a wheelchair attendant in LAX’s Terminal 2, said she can’t afford child care and relies on her 14-year-old to care for her younger son. She said her children see her going to work every day and yet she can’t afford to take them out to eat at a fast-food restaurant, let alone to Disneyland.

“It’s time to make a decent living and stop making slave wages,” Robinson said. “We can’t even afford to pay rent from one paycheck.”