Facing a potentially popular pair of November Ballot Initiatives, the legislature and Governor have now acted on a $15 minimum wage hike. The signing Monday, at the Ronald Reagan State Building in LA, saw Governor Brown say "“This is about economic justice. It’s about people. It’s about creating a little, tiny amount of balance in a system that every day becomes more unbalanced.”
The legislation will will bump the state’s $10 hourly minimum by 50 cents next year and to $11.00 in 2018. Hourly $1 raises will then come every year until 2022. Among the compromises reached int he bill to keep the proposal off the ballot are the capacity for a Governor to "hit pause" on the hikes. It also includes indexing provisions. In all, it makes California the most aggressive actor in the action on wage issues, increasingly an issue in the presidential primarily and one that has, as we have written, been impacting local politics for some time.
Among the many fascinating angles of this, including economic and political, perhaps to us the most intriguing is this as another instance where action by California cities have moved significant change at the legislative level. Cities including San Francisco and LA typically led the charge, as they've done with plastic bag bans and other issues, with many smaller cities following suit. Contentious and lengthy processes in cities like West Hollywood, Pasadena, Long Beach and more, many of which saw varied outcomes in terms of the final wage increase, will now be subsumed by state action. This phenomenon was written up at some length by CalMatters last year. CityNews Editor Robb Korinke was quoted in that piece "It’s a tried-and-true playbook that unions and their allies are building on,” Korinke said. “They start in large cities where they have a lot of influence … . First, you peel off the population centers. Then you make the argument that it’s uneven and not fair, and smaller cities get caught in the tidal wave.”
The best rundown of this week's move comes from Anthony York and John Meyers in a Special Edition of their CA Poltics Podcast Monday. You can also read about it from the AP or the Chron. Or you can get your point counterpoint from MSNBC and then the Wall St Journal.