Six years ago, when I was working as a community organizer in San Diego, I got to know Sarah Delgado, a woman hired by the city through a contractor to staff a street-level public restroom downtown. Sarah, a grandmother with a shy smile and a gracious manner, spent almost 40 hours per week there, cleaning toilets, mopping floors, restocking toilet paper, and buzzing people in and out from a tiny booth squeezed in between the men’s and women’s rooms.
Because she didn’t make enough from her full-time job to support her family, Sarah worked an additional 25 hours a week at McDonald’s. Both jobs paid minimum wage and provided no benefits. Even with two jobs, it was a constant struggle for Sarah to provide for her family. She was not alone. Thousands of people in the city worked two or even three jobs, and yet did not earn enough to make ends meet.
In 2003, the Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI), a local nonprofit, put together a basic needs budget for a family with two working adults and two children. CPI found that to pay for the barest necessities, such as rent, food, childcare, and transportation, each adult would need to earn $12.27 an hour—nearly double the state’s minimum wage.
That year, CPI brought together a broad coalition of community groups, unions, students, and others to lobby the city of San Diego to enact a living wage ordinance. A living wage law was not a new idea. At the time, more than a hundred cities and counties had enacted living wage ordinances, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Such laws are necessary because the minimum wage is not based on the poverty threshold; it is simply an expression of political will, or how much legislators are willing to allow low-income workers to have.
While some economists argue that increasing the minimum wage causes job loss, as employers tighten their belts to make up for increased labor costs, studies of real-world living wage ordinances show that this has not happened. University of California economist David Fairris examined the impact of the Los Angeles living wage ordinance, which affected some 10,000 workers, and found that it “increased wages for low-income workers without serious employment loss or negative consequences for the firms that employ them.”
In San Diego, living wage proponents faced a tough fight. The city was in the midst of a fiscal crisis, and opponents argued that the city could not afford to increase workers’ wages at such a time. But living wage activists responded that the ordinance made long-term fiscal sense. Moreover, raising wages improves morale, reducing turnover and increasing productivity.
San Diego’s Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice played a key role in the campaign by mobilizing the faith community in support of a living wage. More than 50 local religious congregations and 90 religious leaders publicly endorsed the campaign. Dozens of clergy members in their collars became a common sight in the City Council chambers. When key votes were recorded, clergy held prayer services on the steps of the City Council building and people of faith representing congregations from across the city packed the chambers inside.
In 2005, after some five years of work by living wage advocates, the San Diego City Council voted to enact a living wage ordinance by a 5 to 4 vote. The council meeting had to be held in a special auditorium instead of the normal council chambers because more than 600 living wage supporters showed up. The ordinance requires city contractors to pay employees $10 an hour plus $2 an hour in health benefits, or $12 an hour, a rate that would increase with inflation. Some 2,000 employees were affected, many of them janitors, hotel housekeepers, security guards, landscapers, and food service workers.
Today, the city’s contracted employees make $11 an hour, plus $2.20 an hour in health benefits, or $13.20 an hour. The dire predictions made by the law’s opponents that it would bankrupt the city have not come true. In addition to improving the livelihoods of thousands of people, it inspired an overdue conversation about work and wages and established as common sense the principle that people who work full-time should not be living in poverty.
Sarah was one worker who did not benefit from the living wage ordinance. She was fired by her employer after speaking at a City Council meeting in support of a living wage. I was living far across the country then, and when I found out what had happened to her, I called immediately. “It’s okay,” she told me. “I did the right thing.”
Clare DiSalvo was a summer research intern with Bread for the World in 2009. She is a graduate student in public policy at the University of Minnesota.
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