Last night, the efforts started by Silicon Valley Rising (SVR) to achieve a regional minimum wage took a solid step forward at the Santa Clara County Cities Association (Cities Association) meeting.
For more than a year, Silicon Valley Rising has been leading the charge to raise the minimum wage throughout the Valley and has seen success in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and most recently Palo Alto and Santa Clara. These cities have also committed to SVR’s goal of working towards a regional minimum wage of $15 an hour.
These victories have kept the momentum strong for the Raise the Wage campaign in the Valley and have motivated the largest city in the region, San Jose, to consider increasing its minimum wage and joining SVR’s regional movement.
Currently, the County of Santa Clara has 3 different minimum wages, pitting employees and businesses against one another and ultimately hurting the workers who earn the region’s lowest minimum wage. A $15 an hour regional salary is a common sense solution that allows all of the Valley’s low wage workers to earn a uniform pay and helps get them out from below the poverty line.
Yesterday, the Cities Association discussed a minimum wage study set forth by Mayor Liccardo of San Jose. While everyone agrees that a study to research the impacts of raising the minimum wage is vital, the outlined direction for San Jose’s study falls short. There are a number of concerns with the study that Silicon Valley Rising has expressed, and last night, those concerns were echoed by various members of the Cities Association.
The study proposes excluding entire portions of our population from earning a new minimum wage including, but not limited to homeless individuals, teenagers, and emancipated foster youth. Yet, it does not provide the research necessary to understand the consequences of marginalizing these populations. Moreover, Boardmembers from Los Altos, Monte Sereno, and Saratoga, to name a few, expressed opposition to denying specific groups of people the right to earn a new minimum wage. Jason Baker, Vice Mayor of Campbell and President of the Cities Association, also articulated the need to understand the “real benefits and consequences” for the suggested exclusions.
There is also concern with the lack of community involvement included in the process. It is of upmost importance that in addition to gathering information from economists and academic experts, we create a process that allows everyday people across the County of Santa Clara to partake in the conversation of creating a regional strategy on minimum wage. As President Jason Baker said yesterday, the Cities Association can and should play a leadership role in ensuring the public outreach process is a truly regional process and not simply concentrated in San Jose.
Additionally, the study assumes that small businesses will not be able to comply with a higher minimum wage and will result in lost jobs and closed businesses. Past minimum wage hikes have proven the exact opposite to be true. Nonetheless, the study should include an analysis of how small businesses will be impacted by a possible wage increase, without making prior assumptions.
The simple reality is that in order for the Cities Association to move forward on a regional minimum wage an accurate assessment of the benefits and consequences of a possible wage increase, that included regional and city specific impacts, must be conducted.
Last night the Cities Association voted for a more robust and comprehensive study, via a motion by Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Mathews. Specifically, they voted to include public outreach to the process and examine the costs and benefits to families of any exclusions.
Silicon Valley Rising and their partners, a collaboration of neighborhood, civil rights and poverty relief activists, and faith and labor leaders, have spearheaded the minimum wage fight, and yesterday the Cities Association joined that fight. Raising the minimum wage is not negotiable and SVR and the Cities Association made clear that the first step to a regional approach is a comprehensive, unbiased study that includes community participation.
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