Restoring An American Tradition: A Fair Day’s Pay

Torie Osborn
Special to the Mirror

   Picture this: A middle-class, middle-aged writer with a Ph.D. embarks on the adventure of a lifetime – trying to survive on minimum-wage jobs. That’s the departure point for Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling Nickel & Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. The stage adaptation just opened at the Mark Taper Forum and both book and play present a startling portrait of a rapidly-growing sector of the American poor – the working poor. Despite hard work, intelligence and desperate penny-pinching, Ehrenreich can’t make ends meet – let alone get ahead!
   Nickel & Dimed sharply focuses the stakes involved in an initiative on the Santa Monica ballot this fall — Measure JJ, the Santa Monica Living Wage Law. Ehrenreich’s temporary adventure is a permanent situation for housekeepers and busboys in the city’s toniest beachfront hotels. And those men and women aren’t making ends meet any better than Ehrenreich did. If you doubt it, do the math. Close your eyes and imagine trying to make ends meet on little more than $1,000 a month, as hundreds of hardworking people in this city have to do. Rent, food, utilities, children’s books and shoes, the dentist, the bus. Medical insurance? Yipes! you’re way over-budget!!
   For years, the federal government has steadfastly refused to recognize that the minimum wage doesn’t remotely reflect what it costs to live in Santa Monica or anywhere else. When FDR introduced the minimum wage nearly 70 years ago, it was $3 higher an hour – in adjusted dollars – than it is today. These days, a hard day’s work no longer guarantees a fair day’s pay, and frankly, that’s not fair. Indeed, I’d call it a dangerous departure from an American tradition we need to recapture and restore. That’s why the Liberty Hill Foundation, a Santa Monica-based foundation where I serve as executive director, has supported Santa Monica’s living wage, and before that, L.A.’s living wage.
   Some have criticized Liberty Hill and other foundations for supporting living wage campaigns instead of limiting our grants to helping house the homeless and feed the hungry. When Liberty Hill first opened its doors in Santa Monica in 1976, its founders – like so many local Santa Monicans – looked at the world with an appreciation for out-of-the-box thinking. They realized that a shelter was never going to solve homelessness and a food bank would never solve hunger. They embraced a philosophy of change, not charity. Today, we understand that poverty wages will only beget poverty.
   Measure JJ, Santa Monica’s living wage law, is an innovative strategy for meeting the basic needs of low-wage Santa Monicans. Five years ago, when L.A. passed its living wage law, critics called it risky. Now, that law’s benefits have become abundantly clear. It has lifted families out of poverty and boosted productivity as well. It’s no surprise then that Santa Monica’s impact study indicated that the law would have similar benefits here.
   Twice in the recent past, Santa Monica effectively ratified the substance of Measure JJ: first, when voters resoundingly rejected a phony living wage proposition that tried to dupe voters into accepting a sow’s ear for a silk purse, and then when the city council passed a real living wage ordinance. Now, opponents are suggesting that the law will cost millions in lost city services. Their projections are so farfetched they’d make Arthur Anderson proud.
   Like other tourist meccas, Santa Monica saw tourism revenue decline last year as a result of September 11 and the city council was forced to implement very modest spending cuts. But there is no city deficit as some living wage opponents have claimed. Measure JJ’s cost to the city, while difficult to estimate to the penny, will be modest — primarily to pay the health benefits for part-time and seasonal city employees, and in higher contract costs as city contractors raise wages to meet the new living wage.
   In Spanish, the living wage is called sueldo digno, a wage with dignity. Measure JJ restores dignity to the wages of hard-working men and women in Santa Monica’s luxury hotels. I’ll be voting for Measure JJ on November 5. I hope you will be too. Together, we can restore an American tradition that goes to the heart of who we are and what we believe in.
   Torie Osborn is the executive director of the Santa Monica-based Liberty Hill Foundation.