What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Los Angeles is at a turning point. We are living in a defining moment. What happens next is up to us. Over the past few years, problems and challenges have shaken this city -- and tremendous opportunities for change have presented themselves. How do we rise to this moment and emerge a better place to live? What will it take to create a more just and a more equitable community? Working together, how are we going to create a stronger, forward-thinking Los Angeles? Mike Bonin, writer, teacher, progressive activist and former City Councilmember, looks at the issues and problems facing Los Angeles, examines ideas, and talks with the people who will lead us to a brighter future.
Produced in partnership with LA Forward.
What's Next, Los Angeles? with Mike Bonin
Prop 32: Raise the Wage
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Should California raise its minimum wage? That's the question posed by Proposition 32 on the state ballot. I speak with Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage on this episode of What's Next, Los Angeles.
What's Next, Los Angeles? is produced and hosted by Mike Bonin, in partnership with LA Forward.
Should California raise its minimum wage? That question is on the ballot with Proposition 32. We'll discuss it today on what's next, Los Angeles. Hi, everybody, and welcome. It's Mike Bonan. Thank you so much for joining me. Millions of Californians live in poverty. Millions of Californians who work full-time jobs live in poverty. We're talking about home care givers, clerks in retail stores, domestic workers, farm workers, restaurant workers, and a whole lot more. The majority of the workers making poverty wages in California are either under age 25 or over age 50. About 40% of them have kids under the age of 18. Most of California's poverty wage workers are not married, and about 10% of them are the sole breadwinners for their households, households with children. They are disproportionately Latino, and 40% of them are immigrants. Now, there are various minimum wages around the state, some for individual cities and some for specific industries. But most cities have no minimum wage at all and therefore rely on the statewide basic minimum wage of $16 an hour. Now that comes out to about $2,500 per month before taxes. The vast majority of LA County's 88 cities rely on that state minimum wage. Proposition 32 on our ballot would raise that basic wage from $16 to $18. The proposal would increase the minimum wage at different speeds depending on the size of the company. So for companies with 26 or more workers, the minimum wage would hit $18 in January of 2025. If it's a smaller company, under 25 folks, it would hit $18 on January 1 of 2026. And then for both sizes, yearly increases would be indexed to the consumer price index. Prop 32 was put on the ballot by Los Angeles investor and anti-poverty advocate Joe Sandberg. Joining me today to talk about Prop 32 is Saraya Rahman. She's the founder and executive director of One Fair Wage. It's a national organization working to end all subminimum wages in the United States and to raise wages and working conditions in the service sector in particular. She has been one of the leading voices in favor of Proposition 32. Sara, welcome to What's Next Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01Oh, thanks so much for joining me. This is uh an issue that is extremely important and one very near and dear to my heart. It's one I worked on locally here in Los Angeles years ago. Uh let me start with the the question I ask of all proponents of a statewide proposition in this cycle, which is what problem are we solving for?
SPEAKER_00So California has an affordability crisis. If you look at the MIT living wage calculator, which I encourage anybody listening to look at, you just put an MIT living wage calculator, you will see that for the state of California, one adult with no children needs a minimum of $27.32 just to cover the basics of life: rent, transportation, food bills. Uh, if you have one child, even if there are two working adults, if you have one child, you need $44.11. And that is just to cover the basics of living. Now, let's look at even if you think, okay, it's more expensive in some parts of California than another, fine. Let's look at the cheapest county in California, which is uh Shasta, Shasta County, you know, way up by Mount Shasta. If you're one adult with no children, you still need $21.93 to cover the basics of life. And if you are in a two-adult household, you need 30 with one child, you need $37.73. So there's nowhere, nowhere in California where the minimum wage even comes close to the actual cost of living, which is why earlier this year, the California uh government, state government's legislative analyst office put out a pretty comprehensive report in March saying that the minimum wage is way too low and sharing some pretty heartbreaking statistics. People are either leaving the state or living for their lifetimes in multi-adult, no family households, choosing for the first, I've been doing this work for 22 years, choosing for the first time in my career, in my lifetime of working on minimum wage, choosing not to have children for their lifetimes, which just breaks my heart because it means we're denying younger people the chance to ever have a family, ever be able to afford their own home so that they can have a family. And what does that mean? I represent restaurant workers. I represent, frankly, the 2 million or so non-union restaurant workers, the lowest wage workers in California. And again, I've been doing this work for 22 years. I have never seen or talked to so many workers who are working full-time or more than full-time and living in their cars. I have never experienced the level of home insecurity among our working people populations that we're seeing right now. That's the problem.
SPEAKER_01That is well over 100% of somebody making minimum wage right now. Even in LA's lowest income neighborhoods where the rents are lowest, still in between 2,000 and 2200. That's like 80% of uh of your salary uh on minimum wage. It's minimum wage is not a livable wage.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And so what does that translate into? Again, we can look at MIT Living Mage Calculator for LA County. For LA County, you need $26.63 just to cover the basics. This is not taking your children to Disneyland or even buying them Christmas gifts. This is just survival as one adult with zero children. If you have one child, forget it, it's over $40 in LA County.
SPEAKER_01So what does Prop 32 do about that problem?
SPEAKER_00Prop 32 would raise the state minimum wage but from $16 to $18 for large businesses and $17 for small businesses. Over two years, it will get to $18 for everybody. So it's one small, modest step in the right direction. It is not the ultimate solution. We want everybody, the legislature, the county legislate, the county board of supervisors, LA City Council to know they have the power to go above this. This is one small step for the state to get people in Fresno and Modoc County up a little bit higher to closer to a to a to something that allows them to survive. But what we're really needing is to go above that, both statewide and certainly in places like Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_01And and hope hopefully we'll go even higher in LA. There's some folks who are pushing an Olympic wage of $25, $30 uh for people who will be making the Olympics happen in Los Angeles. And I'll be doing that.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think it should be $25 in LA for everybody, regardless of the Olympics, you know.
SPEAKER_01I'm with you. I'm with you. Uh so let me ask who stands to benefit if Prop 32 passes?
SPEAKER_00So our calculation is that it's anywhere between two and 3.5 million workers in the state of California who are overwhelmingly people of color, immigrants, especially overwhelmingly women. Uh they spew younger, but lots of adults, lots of adults with children. Um, and who what kind of workers they're restaurant workers, retail workers, home care workers, childcare workers. That is largely who they are. They're the lowest wage workers in California. And this would give them about a $3,000 uh wage increase. $3,000 could mean for these workers the ability to have a car to go to work. Um, it it could be a significant, not necessarily lifting people out of poverty, but a significant improvement in their life.
SPEAKER_01And correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what we've seen in other jurisdictions is when you you raise the minimum wage, not only are you raising wages for the people who are making minimum wage, but it has the impact of inflating the wage of people who are a tier or two ahead of that. Their wages also go up.
SPEAKER_00That's right. The Economic Policy Institute has average, on average, says that people who earn up to 15% above the wage increase will get a raise. So that means anybody under $21 an hour is likely to see an increase. That's more like 5 million workers, Mike. You know, 2 million workers would go from 16 to 18, but 5 million workers earn less than $21 an hour in California and could see a bump because we normally, as you said, see people just above the minimum wage get a bump as well.
SPEAKER_01So uh this proposition is uh opposed by a few groups of people, uh, the California Restaurant Association, the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Grocers Association. I guess none of those are really a surprise. They've tended to oppose wage increases wherever they are.
SPEAKER_00That's right. The National Restaurant Association, which the California Restaurant Association is a part of, was founded in 1919 with the express mission, intent, and purpose of trying to deny black people any wage at all after emancipation. During Jim Crow, they tried to hire these workers for free. And they've been around for 105 years, basically trying to suppress any wage increase wherever it occurs. And so, no, it's not only not a surprise, it's honestly just an ongoing shame. I think it's a shame because the truth is that these industries do better when their workers do better. There was just a great study that came out of UC Berkeley about the $20 fast food. It showed that everybody's better off. The workers are better off, the industry continues to grow. I mean, the CFO of Denny's admitted this in 2021. He told shareholders on an analyst call actually, Denny's grows faster in California than any other state because we pay our people at that time $15 an hour. And so, guess what happens? Our our workers come bring their families to eat at Denny's, and the company grows and our guest receipts are higher. So they know this. They know this. They fight it not because they actually think it will hurt them, but because of greed.
SPEAKER_01And and yet their their ballot argument is saying proposition 32 will cost jobs, uh, which is really interesting because as I note in the rebuttal to that in the ballot guide, uh, corporate profit margins have increased 100% since 2020.
SPEAKER_00That's right. That's right. And and let's be real in LA, very few people earn less than $18 an hour. A lot of these companies are already paying 18 or higher in places like LA and the Bay Area. You're talking about bringing people in the Central Valley and way up north to the same level that people in LA and the Bay Area are, and then continuing to work to make sure people in LA and the Bay Area actually get a wage that's closer to what they need.
SPEAKER_01And I gotta say, when we back in in 2015 raised the wage to $15 here in Los Angeles, we heard all of these talking points from the local version of the of the California Chamber of Commerce. And none of their predictions came true. Uh, businesses continued continued to flourish, people did better. Uh, it did not have any negative consequence whatsoever economically.
SPEAKER_00No, I have only ever seen the opposite, which is as the CFO of Denny said, businesses grow, workers do better, there's a virtuous cycle that people are able to spend. Guess who spends more than anybody else? It's people at the lower wage end of the spectrum. They spend a much higher percentage of their income than anybody else. And so when they get paid more, the economy does better, more so than when you give the 1% a corporate tax break.
SPEAKER_01Amen. Amen. Um, so why do we need to be doing this by a statewide proposition instead of through the legislative process?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, as somebody who spent a lot of time in Sacramento over the last couple of years trying to get the legislature to even talk to us about a minimum wage increase, I can tell you that there it has been no other way. Um, the legislature is very stymied by these business groups. There's this belief that, oh, we just raised the wage, even though it was quite a while ago that the wage went to 15. And since the pandemic, we've seen a skyrocketing in the cost of living in California and all over the country. Despite all of that, there's still this ridiculous misunderstanding that we just raised the wage, we can't do it again. Uh, and so I really need that legislature to know that this has got to be a very small, modest first step. And they need to act still. If if fast food workers can get 20 statewide, everybody deserves at least 20 statewide, and they need to do that. One more thing, though, about why not the legislature. I again, I represent the 2 million or so non-union restaurant workers around the state. And while you know, unions do a great job arguing for their members, and other organizations do a great job arguing for their members. My folks are the ones who don't have the resources, working three jobs to be in Sacramento and have their voices heard. And so you have to put it to the ballot for the people who aren't don't have the resources to fly, you know, to Sacramento to have their voices heard. This is for democracy to allow the lowest wage workers to say, yes, we do need a raise, and prove that by going to the ballot.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is actually a a case where uh a group of people are using California's initiative process for the purpose it was intended. That's right. It was it was originally put in place uh to help people fight against powerful interests.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01So many of these ballot questions are powerful interests putting their stuff on the ballot. The the California Chamber restaurant grocers, they got a lot of muscle up in Sacramento. And the the people's only response to that is to vote, and and this is the way to do it.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And even then, as you just said, they have so much money to mislead people and provide misinformation, so much money to have misleading advertising advertising. And but still, I think at the end of the day, raising the minimum wage is so universally popular, not just in California, but across this country in red states, blue states, red counties, blue counties, everybody pretty much agrees, except for the chamber and the restaurant association and the 1%, that when you work, you deserve to be paid by your employer a wage that allows you to feed your family, pay the rent, and maybe, maybe have enough to buy them Christmas gifts.
SPEAKER_01Very good. Uh any uh closing thoughts? You want to leave with the voters and listeners?
SPEAKER_00Yes, uh, we are behind as a state. Not only are we experiencing the worst affordability crisis in a country that's experiencing an affordability crisis nationally, but we're behind. Hawaii passed 18 a couple of years ago. And a lot of states right now are considering $20 an hour. Massachusetts, Minnesota are considering $20 an hour, and multiple cities and counties in Washington state already passed $20 an hour. Toquilla, Renton, and Kings County, which is where Seattle is, all past $20 an hour. So we are behind as a state. Uh, and being the most expensive state in the country, we need $18, we need to say yes on Prop 32, raise the minimum wage statewide to 18 as a first step, and then keep fighting for much higher, which is what people need and deserve.
SPEAKER_01We need to catch up and we need to get back in the lead for the fight for economic justice. Uh SARU, J.R. Rauman, president of One Fair Wage, thanks for joining me on What's Next Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01And that does it for this episode of What's Next Los Angeles. My thanks to SARU for joining me and to my friend Marga Ify for editing. And my thanks to LA Forward for partnering with me and co-sponsoring this podcast. If you'd like to know more about Proposition 32 or really pretty much anything on the ballot, check out the LA Forward Voter Guide, which I have linked in the show notes. And a special announcement in case you missed it LA Forward is reviving the popular LA podcast about LA news and politics. And I am excited, I will be one of the co-hosts. There's a new pre-election episode. It's out this week with me and Alyssa Walker and Rachel Reyes, and with Godfrey Plata and David Levitis of LA Forward. Check that out wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks so much for listening, and thanks so much for spreading the word about this podcast and that one. Until next time, thank you. Take good care and peace.