[Editor’s Note: Mr. McKeown, mayor of Santa Monica and a 17-year member of the City Council, addressed the Culver City Democratic Club last week. His role was to explain crucial details that will affect low-wage families, and what Santa Monica is doing in those areas. The following essay was adapted from the Santa Monica Democratic Club newsletter.]
Santa Monica Democrats long have championed workers’ rights and the fight against income inequality.
Fifteen years after business interests snatched a local living wage out the pockets of family breadwinners, Santa Monica is poised before year’s end to enact a fair and just minimum wage that will set the standard for the region.
Building on progress already made at the Los Angeles City and County levels, Santa Monica has proposed not only a phased rise to $15 an hour for the lowest paid of our local workers, but groundbreaking precedents like “union supercession,” paid sick days, and a guarantee that if employers try to siphon tips with “service charges,” all that money must go only to workers, including back-of-house employees in restaurants.
Santa Monica has, for years, required all city employees and workers for city contractors be paid an enhanced local minimum wage, currently $15.37 an hour.
Now, though, the national dialogue on extending higher minimum wages to everyone in our economy has encouraged us to bring these benefits to all the workers who make our local economy thrive.
While wage increases will phase in for most sectors of our economy, allowing businesses to adjust, Santa Monica’s hospitality industry enjoys special support and protection from our community, and higher profitability due to our desirability as a travel destination.
Therefore, like Los Angeles before us, we will raise the wages of all hotel workers immediately to the same level as our city workers, contractors, and workers covered under recently approved hotel Development Agreements.
In the city of Los Angeles, entrenched anti-union businesses and the Los Angeles Times threatened the right of workers to organize themselves and negotiate for a package of wages and benefits that serves them better than the general minimum.
Santa Monica believes that the ability to forge a mutually negotiated contract between workers and a business is a fundamental right.
By unanimous vote, our City Council already has supported “union supercession,” and thereby committed to preserving workers’ collective bargaining rights.
Restaurants have been vociferous in complaining that tipped workers don’t deserve a minimum wage.
Some have threatened to append mandatory “service charges” to customers’ bills, which uninformed patrons will almost certainly assume are a standardized “tip.”
If so, in Santa Monica, the Council has agreed that any money so collected must go to workers in addition to their wages, not be skimmed off by restaurant owners to compensate for their payroll increases.
Right now further outreach is underway to make sure we get all the details right in our minimum wage ordinance. We will go to a vote of the City Council in December.
As your Mayor, I hope to make Santa Monica a reference city for workers’ rights — and that’s something of which Santa Monica Democrats can be proud.
Mr. McKeown may be contacted at kevin@mckeown.net
