The decision by the Los Angeles city council and Mayor Eric Garcetti to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour may end up costing Los Angeles County residents another $42 million over the next four years. Unions are using the city’s raise to call for increasing the wages of county-subsidized in-home caregivers.
Two L.A. County supervisors, Hilda Solis and Mark Ridley-Thomas, are expected to introduce a union-backed proposal Tuesday to raise the caregivers’ wages. The initial raise would be modest, from $9.65 to $11.18, but Ridley-Thomas has described it as a stepping stone to $15.
The move comes as organized labor is continuing to push for an exemption from the new city wage for unionized businesses. Thus, an increase that many supporters thought would require businesses to pay their workers more instead may yet exclude many employers while costing county taxpayers substantially more.
The supervisors’ proposal cites the city’s increase as the rationale for increasing the wages paid through the county’s In-Home Supportive Service program. An estimated 144,000 caregivers are in the program, about three-fourths of whom are taking care of elderly or disabled family members.
Scott Mann, spokesman for SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, which represents the caregivers, said the need for the raise was simple — the caregivers need the money.
“Eighty-one percent of them live in poverty,” Mann said.
A spokeswoman for Ridley-Thomas told the Washington Examiner they expected to have at least one more member of the council support the proposal. Four votes would be required to adopt the proposal, so its fate is uncertain.
The exemption from the city wage that unions are seeking faces stiff opposition, too. Garcetti’s office said he does not support it. But some businesses may come out in support once the city’s new minimum takes effect.
The county’s caregiver raise would be phased in over four years and cost $11.9 million in fiscal years 2015-16 and $30.6 million in fiscal years 2017-18 once fully phased in, according to the supervisors’ proposal. The rate would presumably continue to cost about $30 million annually for each year after the phase-in to $11.18 is complete.
The proposal also would allow future increases to be made by a simple majority of the county council, as opposed to the current four-fifths requirement, raising the likelihood of further increases — something the increase’s supporters have pledged.
“The Board of Supervisors must increase these in-home workers’ wages incrementally every year to $15 an hour,” said Ridley-Thomas in a May op-ed for the Huffington Post.
Later in the op-ed, he said, “[I]t is critical that we establish a living wage of up to $15.79 by 2018.”
Solis is President Obama’s former labor secretary and ardent supporter of organized labor. In 2009, she told an AFL-CIO convention, “I am proud and humbled to be your humble servant as labor secretary.”
The county program is underwritten through a combination of federal, state and county funds. About half is federal money from Medicaid. The state of California pays about 30 percent. The rest comes from the county.
The subsidy recipients are considered county employees and have been represented by SEIU United Long Term Care Workers since 1999. All caregivers in the program are obligated to join the union and their dues are automatically deducted from their subsidy checks. The union has been lobbying the county to increase the caregivers’ subsidies to get close in line with the city’s minimum wage.
When the city was poised to pass the $15 minimum, Los Angeles unions requested an exemption for unionized businesses. Mann said he did not know if the caregivers’ union also backed that exemption.
Union leaders, who had lobbied the city hard for the $15 wage, argued that they needed the flexibility to allow workers to be paid less when working out contracts with employers. The workers could, for example, trade the higher wage for other benefits.
The exemption also would create a powerful incentive for city businesses to unionize their companies on behalf of their workers. That would allow the employers to then strike deals with labor leaders to pay their workers less than the new minimum.
Rusty Hicks, president of the Los Angeles AFL-CIO labor federation, called the exemption a “workers’ rights measure.” L.A. businesses accused the unions of hypocrisy. Amid a public backlash, Garcetti and others on the council rejected the exemption.
The unions have not given up and plan to continue lobbying the city, with sources saying they think they can get the city to propose a follow-up ordinance after its holds hearings on the implementation of the wage hike.
