Firms Skirt Wage Law, Panel Told

While Mayor Richard Riordan on Wednesday defended his record on persuading contractors, particularly at the airport, to comply with the city’s year-old living wage law, a City Council panel was told repeatedly that hundreds of workers--including scores at the airport--are going without the raises and benefits due them.

Riordan said he has discussed the controversial living wage law with individual airline chiefs, the U.S. secretary of transportation and the head of the nation’s airline association.

“The bottom line is that the airlines can afford to pay a living wage,” Riordan said. “To pay $5.25 an hour to security people, who check baggage at the airport, is sinful. . . . I think people have the right to a living wage. I don’t think government should dictate it.”

The controversial law, which the mayor vetoed only to be overridden by the City Council, requires municipal contractors to pay workers $7.25 an hour with specified benefits or $8.50 without benefits.

But in a hearing on the law before the council’s Personnel Committee on Wednesday afternoon, several officials from advocacy, labor and other groups said the airlines, among other contractors, have skirted the law. Further, they say the city is laxly enforcing it.

Miguel Contreras, the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, backed the mayor’s account of his efforts to persuade airlines to abide by the living wage ordinance, but the labor leader said: “Wishes are not reality.”

Riordan said he believes “morally” in the living wage, but that he does not believe that it should be mandated by government. Although Deputy Mayor Kelly Martin said Tuesday that because of the law businesses are refusing to seek contracts with the city, Riordan backed away from that contention Wednesday.

“So far, I don’t see a major impact,” Riordan said, adding, however, that he believes that it does make Los Angeles less competitive to some businesses because of it.

In his remarks to the Personnel Committee, Contreras said the City Council should force--by law--the airlines to pay contract workers the living wage.

If city departments fail to comply, he said, “we’ll always be a two-tiered city of the haves and have-nots.”

Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who has championed the living wage issue and who chairs the personnel panel, expressed frustration that the city’s Bureau of Contract Administration has not been more aggressive in seeking compliance by other departments. Further, she said the bureau needs to require more employers to submit documents proving that they are paying the living wage salaries.

Goldberg said she will consider possible changes to the ordinance that could require more workers--at the airport in particular--to be covered.

Several airport workers told the panel that they are receiving less money than others doing similar work in different terminals.

“I’m asking that you revise the language of the ordinance so we can all get the living wage at all terminals of the airport,” said Juan Guitierrez, a janitor who works without the living wage in United Airlines’ Terminal 7.

The Los Angeles Living Wage Coalition, which pushed for the law and now monitors it, and a UCLA professor who was hired to evaluate it found that compliance with the law was spotty at best throughout the city.

UCLA professor Richard Sander said hundreds of contracts that should pay living wages fail to do so. He suggested that only about 150 workers have received pay increases, compared to the thousands expected. (The Living Wage Coalition disagreed, saying that the numbers are closer to 1,500 workers who have either received raises or should have gotten them.)

A Bureau of Contract Administration report issued Wednesday found that as of the end of April, 363 contracts of 529 were considered exempt from the ordinance, leaving just 166 covered by it. At the airport, the bureau said 29 of 127 contracts should be covered by the living wage ordinance; the others are exempt from it.

But Bernard Gilpin, the head of the bureau, defended his agency’s handling of the ordinance, saying at the end of the hearing: “I still think we’re doing a very good job.”

Another review of the ordinance is expected by the bureau in July.