SJ Minimum Wage Success Inspires Others

It’s been a year since San Jose voters overwhelmingly decided to raise the City’s minimum wage to $10 an hour, and guess what?  Not only has the sky NOT fallen, as critics warned, but the economy and low wage workers are better off than they were a year ago.

Some of the major supporters of Measure D, as it was called on the ballot, gathered recently to observe the one year anniversary of the measure’s implementation that raised the wage by $2 in one fell swoop. The measure had the support of the San Jose State students who came up with the idea and worked hard to pass the measure; the South Bay Labor Council ran the field campaign to get voters to the polls, and major community service organizations like Working Partnerships USA, United Way Silicon Valley and Sacred Heart Community Services supported it.  Overall data from the last year backs up the initial belief that passing the increase was the right thing to do.

And one more thing happened: a movement was ignited. Berkeley, Eureka, Davis, Mountain View and Sunnyvale all have on-going efforts to raise the minimum wage, and took part in San Jose’s anniversary tribute. Verbana Lea from the Eureka Fair Wage Initiative said the double-digit unemployment and the state’s highest poverty rate caused this group to put forward a measure on the 2014 ballot that will require all large employers to pay a $12 minimum wage in the City of Eureka. They have already qualified the measure for the 2014 ballot.  The Eureka Fair Wage Initiative expects “to have similar results as the folks in San Jose have found:  When you raise the pay of the workers, the whole community benefits,” Lea said.

Meghan Farley from the Mountain View group Politically Inspired Action called on her City Council to pass a similar ordinance to match San Jose’s.  Meghan reminded the crowd that Mt. View is home to Google, as well as many other high tech companies, who are producing cutting edge technology, but that the people who provide the necessary services for these folks are not able to support themselves and their families. Meghan argued that “Today, in Mountain View and Silicon Valley, minimum wage is not enough for a family to make ends meet. By raising the minimum wage, and indexing it to the cost of living, we will be able to build a community truly at the forefront.  As we are surrounded by the highest per capita rate of millionaires and billionaires, let’s not make working people wait year after year for a wage high enough that they can live on. Let’s create a fair system now that works for everyone in our community.”

Marie Bernard, Executive Director of Sunnyvale Community Services, said she is supporting a $10.15 minimum wage in Sunnyvale because her organization serves 7,000 people every year.  Twenty-five per cent of the 144,000 residents of Sunnyvale are at risk of hunger.  Incredibly, 49% of all children in Sunnyvale schools qualify for free or reduced lunches.  And although she believes that raising the minimum wage to $10.15 an hour in Sunnyvale won’t solve all the problems in Sunnyvale, she thinks “it will help low-wage workers have a little more money in their pockets for life’s necessities.”

The success of San Jose’s minimum wage increase can be seen in these other local efforts and beyong.  The State of California got the confidence to raise the wage after seeing what was done in San Jose, and the federal government is talking about it more often as well.  Did San Jose’s wage increase do all this?  Who knows? But our success is no coincidence; it is simply the right thing to do.

 

Scott Myers-Lipton is a professor at San Jose State University in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences.  It was his class that came up with the wage increase idea.  Myers Lipton is also the author of the forthcoming book:  Ending Extreme Inequality:  An Economic Bill of Rights to Eliminate Poverty (available 10/2014, Paradigm Publishers, www.paradigmpublishers.com)

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