Labor advocates and some elected officials are calling on Los Angeles County to adopt a minimum wage of at least $25 an hour.
On Monday, about 150 workers, labor leaders, Democratic party officials and loyal donors gathered at private tables reserved in the back of Wally’s Wine & Spirits in Santa Monica to launch a new effort to raise the minimum hourly wage in L.A. County to $25 — or higher.
Amid the tinkle of glassware and clang of cutlery, Saru Jayaraman, an L.A. attorney and president of One Fair Wage, a national coalition pushing to raise wages in the service sector, emphasized the urgency of addressing a steep increase in the cost of living.
“We need bold, proactive action,” Jayaraman said. “That’s the only way people will be able to afford to stay in L.A. County.”
A person living in L.A. County and working full-time in a household without children must earn about $28 an hour in order to cover basics of rent, transportation and food, Jayaraman said, citing MIT’s living wage calculator.
The hourly minimum wage in Los Angeles is $17.28, 78 cents higher than the state’s.
No wage proposal has yet been submitted to the county, Jayaraman said, but labor groups plan to work with the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to hash out the specifics.
The campaign is sure to face staunch resistance from business groups.
It follows L.A. City Council’s approval of wage boosts for airport and hotel workers to $30 an hour by 2028. Hotels and tourism industry groups have continued to fight the new ordinance, filing paperwork last week to force a citywide vote to overturn it.
Business leaders who opposed the tourism wage hike had warned that Southern California — like other tourism hotspots across the U.S. — is already facing a slowdown in international travel due to trade war hostilities and deportation threats. To manage the mounting cost of labor, hotels will be forced close restaurants or other small businesses on their premises — and in some cases, shut down entirely, they said.
The coalition of businesses that is seeking to overturn the wage — the L.A. Alliance for Tourism, Jobs and Progress — will need to gather about 93,000 signatures within the next few weeks in order to qualify the measure for the ballot in an upcoming election.
L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who backed the tourism wage boost, said unions were bracing for a fight in the coming weeks and months.
“Corporations and businesses are only going to go more on the attack and do everything in their power to reverse these policies,” she said. “We are talking about workers being able to buy food, and live in the city they work in.”
The campaign to boost the minimum wage has the backing of L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who said at the event that she often hears from her constituents that they are being priced out.
“What it costs to just survive in Los Angeles County — it takes away my breath every day,” Mitchell said.
Mitchell supports an across-the-board minimum wage increase, rather than efforts to raise industry-specific wages.
“This might not be a popular thing to say, but we don’t help ourselves when we have a piecemeal, sector-by-sector approach,” Mitchell said.
Besides tourism workers, healthcare and fast-food workers have also lobbied for improved pay at the state or local level.
In unincorporated areas of L.A. County, the minimum wage is $17.81. The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.
