Workers Trapped at el Minimo

For six months, Gladys Vitro was up to her elbows in other people’s garbage, plucking glass, plastic and cardboard from foul-smelling mounds on a giant conveyor belt.

The garbage sorting followed three months in a 35-degree food processing factory, where the Baldwin Park woman washed, cored and peeled 15 heads of lettuce a minute. Before that, she packed sugar-free candy bars as fast as her fingers could fly.

All three jobs paid the California minimum wage--$5.75 an hour, or $230 a week. Even if Vitro, a 35-year-old widow from Honduras, had worked for 52 weeks straight, she would have earned less than $12,000 last year. No health insurance. No sick days. No job security.

Despite the record-smashing economy, her prospects for this year are no better. “I filled applications at many different places,” she said. “I went to agencies and hotels and factories. It’s the same everywhere. El minimo--that’s all there is for people like me.”

Forget the image of a teenager flipping burgers on the weekend. In the new Los Angeles, the lowest-paid worker is far more likely to be someone like Vitro--an adult immigrant on an assembly line, working fast and hard, with little opportunity for advancement.

Her story contradicts the popular notion of the minimum wage as a starting point that eager, diligent workers can quickly rise above. A legal U.S. resident, Vitro hasn’t earned more than the minimum since arriving here in 1995, although she’s tried a succession of service and manufacturing jobs.

To be sure, some immigrant workers have fared slightly better. Adrian Fermin, 36, has worked at the same Los Angeles furniture plant for 17 years. In that time, his wage has slowly climbed from the minimum to $9.15 an hour--among the highest of the plant’s 80 production workers. “You might get 10 cents or 15 cents more a year,” said Fermin, who supplements his full-time job at RCR Furniture with a day of yardwork and another day busing tables at an East Los Angeles restaurant.

But across the Southland, there are thousands like Vitro--limited by a lack of English and basic reading and math skills and caught on a treadmill of temporary and low-wage jobs.

For many, the best hope of a raise probably rests with the federal or state governments, both of which are considering proposals to boost the wage floor.

A House vote is expected Friday on a Republican-sponsored tax bill that would increase the U.S. minimum--now $5.15 an hour--by a dollar over the next three years. But Democrats want the raise to take effect over two years, and to index future increases to inflation. President Clinton has said he would veto the Republican plan.

Raising the minimum to $6.15 would boost the paychecks of about 10 million workers, including 1.2 million in California.

Separately, the California Industrial Welfare Commission, an appointed board that can unilaterally raise the state wage, is studying an even larger increase, but isn’t expected to act for at least a year. The state minimum of $5.75--now the lowest on the West Coast--was last raised by a 1996 ballot initiative.

With the economy thriving, opposition to a minimum-wage hike has been muted, although business groups representing restaurants and hotels have said that a substantial increase could cost jobs. California Chamber of Commerce spokeswoman Julianne Broyles recently warned that an increase could set off an inflationary cycle. “There are other ways to make California an affordable place to live and work,” she said.

On the other hand, labor unions advocate a bold increase, noting that the minimum would be $8 per hour today if it had been adjusted for inflation during the last three decades.

Behind the arguments are some startling numbers. They show that California, and particularly Los Angeles, has become home to a large and growing class of chronic minimum-wage earners, some in jobs that once paid far more.

Primarily immigrants from Mexico and Central America, these workers are stuck at el minimo--a phrase that describes a dead-end life as well as a government-set wage floor. They are “cannon fodder for sweatshops,” in the words of Allen Scott, associate dean of the School of Public Policy at UCLA.

Stark Numbers for Los Angeles

More than half of California’s lowest-paid workers--those earning below the proposed federal wage of $6.15 an hour--are Latino, compared with less than one-fifth nationally. California workers earning in that range also are more likely to be adult, work full-time, and hold a manufacturing job, according to an analysis of federal survey data by the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based liberal think tank.

When the EPI looked at Los Angeles alone, the numbers were even more stark. Almost 11% of Los Angeles workers earned the minimum or close to it in 1999, compared with 8.7% nationwide. Of those Los Angeles workers, 28.3% were in manufacturing--a sector that was once a gateway to a solid middle-class life. Nationally, just 8.5% of minimum-wage workers were in manufacturing.

For $5.75 an hour or slightly more, they sew garments, assemble desks and stamp metal, the sort of work that other U.S. regions have already lost to overseas competitors.

But some jobs are new, in fast-growing fields such as food processing, now the third-largest nondurable manufacturing sector in Los Angeles.

In fact, a random survey of food processing companies that were helped by a city business-assistance program found that seven of 10 companies paid most production workers the minimum wage. Four of the seven did not give merit-based or annual wage increases. Instead, the study’s authors wrote, the companies “wait until they are mandated to do so through increases in the state minimum wage.”

The survey, released in October, was funded by the Ford Foundation and conducted by the UCLA School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a nonprofit research and policy organization that studies low-wage workers.

The large number of adults on minimum wage contributes to the high poverty rate in Los Angeles--at 18%, one of the highest in the nation--and the extreme income gap between the top and bottom fifth of workers. In income disparity, California trails only New York, Arizona, New Mexico and Louisiana, according to an EPI analysis.

How did it happen? Cutbacks in defense and other sources of high-wage union manufacturing jobs, intense pressures to reduce production costs, and global competition all conspired to push wages down. At the same time, unprecedented numbers of immigrants--many with rudimentary job skills--came seeking work, allowing some labor-intensive industries to flourish on low wages. Those jobs in turn drew even more low-skilled workers.

“You see it most dramatically in industries like jewelry and furniture, where what were once high-wage and high-quality industries have deteriorated into low-wage, low-quality industries,” said Scott of UCLA. “In a sense, the minimum-wage phenomenon in Los Angeles is a trap. [The region] may keep the jobs temporarily, but you’re competing head to head with Third World countries, and that’s a race you cannot win.”

As Gladys Vitro’s work history shows, the drive to reduce labor costs can take a human toll.

After her husband was killed in a traffic accident in 1995, Vitro left her five young sons with relatives in Honduras and joined an uncle in Los Angeles. With a sixth-grade education, no English skills and no special training, she knew her job prospects were limited. But she hoped to earn enough to feed, clothe and educate her boys back home.

Vitro lasted a year in her first job, washing and ironing uniforms at an El Monte laundry for the then-minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.

She found her next job, as a hotel housekeeper, through classified ads. By then, the minimum was up to $5.15 an hour, and Vitro had remarried. By moving in with her in-laws, Vitro was able to keep her promise to her children, and even set aside a little money toward a car.

But the pace of cleaning one room every 15 minutes was exhausting, even for a wiry, energetic woman in her early 30s. Vitro began scanning the want-ads again. A string of agency assignments followed, most lasting three months--the standard tryout period for a temp.

Her first job of 1999, at the candy factory, ended after she turned down a supervisor’s proposition for a “date,” Vitro said. That was followed by a stint at Ready Pac Produce in Irwindale, where she speedily cored heads of iceberg lettuce with a knife, dipped them in water, and pulled off the outside leaves. “We had to do a minimum of 15 a minute, but they really wanted us to move faster, about 25 a minute,” she said.

Ready Pac managers confirmed that 15 heads of lettuce a minute is a target speed, and that most production jobs are initially filled by temporary agencies, which pay the minimum wage. However, Irwindale plant manager Mark Schieldge said many temps are hired on after three months, and that permanent production workers earn between $6 and $10 per hour. “Our associates are very important to us,” Schieldge said.

Through a friend, Vitro heard about the garbage-sorting job at Athens Disposal in La Puente. It was noisy, dirty work, but steady and permanent.

From 3 to 11 every night, she pawed through mounds of what should have been pure recyclables but included rotting food, animal carcasses, even hospital waste. Once, she broke a finger on a large wine bottle. She often broke out in rashes, she said, as did many of the 250 sorters who worked there. But she liked the hours, which gave her time to clean houses during the day for extra cash.

Taking Matters Into Her Own Hands

In what she said was an effort to improve working conditions and raise wages above the minimum, Vitro was active in helping to unionize the plant. She distributed cards for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and at one point, had collected 75 signatures. But the effort stalled after dozens of workers were fired, and Vitro was badly injured in a fall from a machine that sorted garbage by shaking it through a series of belts.

Vitro is now receiving about $700 a month in state disability payments. An investigation of her accident and the firings of union sympathizers is pending at the National Labor Relations Board. Athens management did not return calls seeking comment.

Her case may be extreme, but in at least one respect, Vitro is not alone. At an Industrial Welfare Commission hearing on the minimum wage in Los Angeles in December, several workers told of having worked for more than a decade in a variety of jobs, never earning more than the minimum.

“I understand that I should be grateful to this land that gives me a lot of opportunities,” testified Maria Marin, 36, saying she had worked in warehouses, hospitals and hotels for 16 years. “But I also understand that we should be earning a little bit more for the hard work that we do.”

Employers, on the other hand, said many workers lack the skills needed to move into higher paying jobs. Without basic skills, and especially without English, workers may require extensive training before it becomes profitable to pay them more than $5.75 an hour.

“A training provider cited one example of a woman who wanted to move from manufacturing to an office job,” said Linda Wong, director of the city-financed Los Angeles Manufacturing Networks Initiative. “She tested out at a second-grade level of English literacy. How realistic is it for a woman with a second-grade level of literacy to find something more than a minimum-wage job?”

Wong argued that raising the minimum wage should be part of a broader approach that would include training workers, helping business owners upgrade technology, and strictly enforcing labor laws.

A substantial hike in the minimum alone could prompt some employers to upgrade technology and train workers on their own, but could force others to eliminate jobs, said several researchers. But those jobs eventually will be lost to foreign competition anyway, said the researchers, who advocated an aggressive industrial development policy that stressed worker training and development of high-end manufacturing jobs.

“We should not be competing with Mexico by trying to push down wages and work standards,” said Raul Hinojosa, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA. “We should be competing on the basis of new technology, better training and work practices. If some of the low-cost production is going to be easier done in Mexico than here, then so be it.”

For her part, Vitro is hoping new skills will help her pull out of the minimum wage trap. She is learning to sew, with the goal of eventually running her own upholstery service.

“I realized I have to do something different,” she said. “It’s a kind of slavery, this minimum wage.”

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Workers at the Minimum

A look at employees earning between the current minimum wage (federal minimum is $5.15, but in some states such as California it is higher) and the proposed new federal minimum of $6.15, in 1999.

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U.S. California Los Angeles

Share of total work force 8.7% 8.6% 10.8%

Minimum-wage workers who are 20 or older 70.8 80.8 86.0

Minimum-wage workers who are full-time employees 48.0 61.3 70.0

Minimum-wage workers who are Latino 19.2 56.2 73.4

Minimum-wage workers in manufacturing 8.5 16.1 28.3

Source: Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal 1999 current population survey

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