Days after Los Angeles became the largest city in the country to raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors made its first moves Tuesday to follow suit.
Supervisor Sheila Kuehl introduced a motion that will be considered at next week’s meeting to match the wage hike in the city of Los Angeles signed into law Saturday by Mayor Eric Garcetti, moving to increase pay for all county employees and for those who work in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County from $9 to $15 per hour by 2020. The board also voted Tuesday, in a 4-to-1 decision, to raise the minimum wage for about 140,000 In-Home Supportive Services providers who care for about 190,000 elderly and disabled patients.
Under the measure, the home care workers’ hourly pay will increase from $9.65 to $11 by February 2016 and to $11.18 by February 2017.
Supervisors Mark Ridley-Thomas and Hilda Solis, who proposed the measure, said the increase would put home care workers “on a path to $15” per hour.
IHSS employees are funded by the county, state and federal governments. Tuesday’s vote is contingent on the state continuing to fund 65 percent of the workers’ wages. The state caps IHSS employees’ pay at $12.10 per hour, said Laphonza Butler, president of the SEIU United Long Term Care Workers.
“We can and should prudently move forward,” Ridley-Thomas said. “This is the maximum that can be allowed by the state without exposing the county to risk from a fiscal point of view. At the same time, it gives a clear indication to those 140,000 workers that they matter and they deserve the dignity of a decent income.”
Butler said she was confident Tuesday’s vote, which gave the IHSS workers their largest pay increase ever, opened a path to $15 per hour.
“For them, it means being able to pay their rent,” she said. “It means not going to food shelters.”
The measure will cost the county $11.9 million in fiscal 2015-16 and $30.6 million the following fiscal year.
Supervisor Don Knabe opposed the plan. He introduced a proposal that would have delayed the increase by eight months to allow the final increase to be effective as of fiscal 2018. That proposal failed.
Hundreds of IHSS workers have attended Board of Supervisors meetings for the past several weeks urging the board to increase their pay. They packed Tuesday’s board meeting, cheered when the vote passed and rallied outside the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, the board’s meeting place, after the vote.
“They were determined to raise their voices and participate in this thing called government,” Butler said.
The IHSS workers will not be included in the minimum wage ordinance the board is expected to consider next week.
Kuehl’s motion introduced Tuesday calls for the county to draft a minimum wage ordinance along the same lines of the measure enacted in the city of Los Angeles.
Kuehl said the county should adopt the same minimum wage plan that brings workers’ pay to $15 per hour by 2020 and encourage the county’s other 87 incorporated cities to do the same.
In March, the county commissioned the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. to study the effect of raising the minimum wage for about 5,000 county employees and minimum wage employees in the county’s unincorporated areas.
The LAEDC released a draft of the report last week.
Kuehl said LACEDC’s survey of 1,000 randomly selected businesses in the county provided new insight about the business owners’ perceptions of the minimum wage increase.
Kuehl pointed to the findings that no business owner said a minimum wage increase would force them to close their business. A large majority of business owners also said it was unlikely they would eliminate the number of minimum wage jobs.
“We find that very few employers surveyed foresee substantial negative impacts from raising the minimum wage, and in fact a commanding percentage believe their businesses and employees will be better off in key respects,” Kuehl said in the motion.
Solis said she will also introduce a motion that will ask county staff to come up with a plan to help small-business owners in the county’s unincorporated areas to transition to the increased minimum wage if it is approved and will ask county staff to analyze the impacts of the increased minimum wage in annual reports.
