Supervisors May Require Contractors to Pay Living Wage

Los Angeles County, the region’s largest employer, Tuesday warned its hundreds of contractors that they may be required to pay their workers some form of living wage.

Though the Board of Supervisors has yet to draft such a law, its admonition makes an ordinance virtually inevitable and adds the county’s weight to a national movement to guarantee pay above the legal minimum wage.

“I don’t know how our children are going to forgive us . . . [for] leaving 20% to 25% of our society naked,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky as he called for a law to be considered next month. “The time has come for us to do this.”

The Board of Supervisors for years has been targeted by a coalition of unions and advocates for the working poor who are seeking to extend the living wage to the county’s 80,000 employees and to workers employed under the 200-odd contracts that it lets annually. Advocates argue that as the county tries to save money by contracting out jobs, it must pay more for those workers by providing public health care and welfare for minimum-wage families.

That campaign’s effects have grown gradually, as the board’s liberal majority in recent weeks has declined to reward contracts to two janitorial companies paying minimum wage.

The issue spilled into the open at Tuesday’s sometimes tense board meeting, as Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke proposed that all bidders for county contracts be warned that the board is considering a living wage policy. She also proposed that all contracts involving workers earning less than $7.75 an hour be let for only one year.

Conservative Supervisor Mike Antonovich blasted the plan, calling it “a Mickey Mouse attempt, which would have the same impact on entry-level positions and small businesses as a living wage.”

Antonovich contended that most people working minimum-wage jobs do not raise families or stay at the same pay level for years.

Burke cut him off: “Your head is really in the sand. You don’t live in L.A.”

Although Tuesday’s meeting demonstrated that advocates have the support of a board majority for a living wage, the shape of that law is still unknown.

Cities such as Boston, Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles have enacted living wage laws in recent years. Supervisors initially were considering the provision of incentives for contractors to pay more, but Tuesday’s debate indicates a growing preference for a simple pay requirement, observers said.

Supervisor Don Knabe, who said he opposes a living wage requirement, suggested changing contracting procedures to encourage companies to enroll employees in the county’s HMO. Union leaders are pushing to require that contracts for jobs now filled by organized county workers be granted only to unionized private companies.

Only about 3,000 employees in the county’s massive work force make less than $8.32 an hour with health benefits, the level that the county auditor-controller has determined to be a living wage, but most of those are part-time or student workers, said county officials.

The living wage requirement would have its greatest effect on the hundreds of contracts the county lets, largely for maintenance and janitorial services.

Supervisor Gloria Molina brushed aside arguments from Antonovich that the requirement would increase the cost of contracting services. “It’s going to cost more money,” she said. “But it’s going to be placing the responsibility directly where it should be--on the employers.”

As it is now, living wage proponents argue, the county takes on the responsibility for low-wage families by spending millions of dollars for welfare and health care payments. An hourly wage of $8.32 with health benefits, the county auditor-controller found, is required to keep a family off welfare.

“If we’re paying $5.75 an hour and we’re taking the responsibility of paying $30,000 in medical treatment for this person, that’s not saving us any money,” Burke said.

Antonovich said no one had studied if the county is truly paying more in taxpayer funds to cover low-wage families. “There is no empirical data being presented,” he said. “It’s all political propaganda.”

But Madeline Janis-Aparacio, a lawyer who heads the Living Wage Coalition, said the supervisors’ decision to move forward shows that government has accepted that taxpayers foot the bill for lean paychecks.