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For decades, hotel workers in Long Beach, Calif., fought for better wages.
But their efforts to start unions mostly fizzled. So last year, union backers tried something new: a ballot measure.
Voters swiftly gave them what years of picket lines and union-card drives had failed to secure – a $13-per-hour minimum wage for hundreds of Long Beach hotel workers.
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N.M. wage efforts In New Mexico, multiple minimum-wage increase efforts have been approved or are under way. Albuquerque voters last fall approved a minimum-wage increase to $8.50 an hour that just took effect, and on Tuesday, Bernalillo County Commissioner Art De La Cruz introduced a proposal to match that hourly wage in the county outside the city limits. The Santa Fe City Council has been most active in the state and the state Legislature jumped into the issue this month, proposing a statewide rise to $8.50 an hour. Santa Fe’s minimum wage of $10.39 is due to increase to $10.51 this month and has competed with San Francisco as the highest minimum wage in the country. The state Legislature’s proposed rise would give New Mexico the highest minimum wage in a six-state region that also includes Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. On a national level, President Barack Obama wants to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour, and Democratic lawmakers in the Senate and House have proposed raising it to $10 an hour. |
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A similar shift happened in San Jose, Calif., where voters in November awarded workers a higher minimum wage not just in hotels, but citywide. The victories are on the cusp of an emerging trend: Ballot initiatives, labor experts say, have the potential to rewrite labor’s playbook for how to win concessions from management.
Long Beach and San Jose join a list of cities nationwide where voters, not unions, have won workers higher wages, demonstrating the power of this new labor tactic.
Opponents decry the strategy as a trick play meant to disguise unionization efforts.
Ballot campaigns allow union leaders to stay behind the scenes while community advocates, students and workers become the face of ostensibly grass-roots campaigns.
“The unions spent more than $250,000 to get this on the ballot since they’ve been unable to unionize these hotels,” said Randy Gordon, CEO of the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. He called the city’s living-wage provision “the worst ballot measure in the history of Long Beach.”
The trend has built slowly. Frustrated in their efforts to fight for higher pay, labor unions began turning to city councils in the 1990s to pass so-called living-wage requirements.
The efforts were small at first, usually affecting only workers employed by government contractors. But as time wore on, scores of such measures passed, eventually totaling more than 140 nationwide. As the victories mounted, proponents have grown more ambitious.
In recent years, labor activists have begun bypassing city councils altogether and taking their push for higher pay directly to voters who, polls show, often view wage increases favorably.
Nationwide, the strategy is by no means a slam-dunk – ballot campaigns are pricey and, thanks to ballot requirements, nearly impossible to win in some states – but in California, where a well-organized signature drive can land almost anything on the ballot, it has almost always been victorious.
Some of the more recent campaigns have been aimed at particular industries or business sectors, such as tourism.
But a few, especially far-reaching wage measures, have been crafted to apply to jobs of every kind and are imposed citywide. Five of these have been passed nationally, three through popular vote, resulting in minimum wages higher than federal requirements for whole cities. San Jose’s measure was the most recent and passed with more than 59 percent of the vote. Every low-wage worker in San Jose stands to benefit from the city’s new $10 minimum wage, and every business must comply, no exceptions.
For the unions that backed the measure, which went into effect Monday, its passage represents a sweeping victory they could never have hoped to achieve through traditional labor-organizing tactics.
Long Beach’s measure affects only workers at large hotels, but it signals a shift in what had been a stymied organizing effort by unions.
— This article appeared on page B1 of the Albuquerque Journal
