As you may have heard, San Jose residents have come up with a proposition that will raise the minimum wage from $8 to $10. The idea of the proposition originated among students in San Jose State, who, along with a sociology professor Scott Myers-Lipton, have gathered enough signatures to make the proposition qualify for the November ballot. The ballot was already held but San Jose officials has given voters time to think about it. If the proposition passes, tens thousands of people in San Jose will be directly affected, as they work low-income jobs or students working minimum wage jobs. Of course, some will oppose and some will be for it. People have their own reasons.
San Jose officials wants time to study the proposal as they don't know if it will affect businesses, or the local economy itself. But, recently, a study from the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley shows that San Francisco's minimum wage was raised to $10.24 an hour. The forced raise did not, however, hurt the local economy or its businesses. It could very well be the same for San Jose but officials still won't believe it until they study it enough.
-Reggie Aranas, student at DeAnza Community College.
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Voters in the Bay Area's largest city will get to decide this fall whether to raise the local minimum wage.
The San Jose City Council on Tuesday night unanimously approved sending voters a ballot initiative in November that seeks to raise the city's minimum wage. Under the measure, the wage would climb from $8 per hour to $10 — an increase of 25 percent — and rise in future years alongside the cost of living.
Supporters wanted council members to bypass the citywide vote and approve the wage increase on Tuesday. State election law and city statutes allowed for both options.
However, a motion to adopt the ordinance outright flopped 3-8.
Council chambers were packed with supporters of the measure. They erupted in applause numerous times during the hearing when people spoke in support of the proposal, and they held signs that said on one side, "Raise The WAGE," and on the other side, "It's Time for $10."
San Jose officials, however, wanted more time to study the proposal. They noted it was pitched by an outside group and didn't get the lengthy analysis that typically accompanies policy changes.
City officials and business leaders say it's unclear how many businesses in San Jose pay their workers the minimum wage. However, the sectors most likely to be affected include food service, retail, manufacturing, and other industries that rely on manual labor.
An estimated 34,000 of San Jose's population of about 1 million would be "directly" affected by the raise, and employers would shed 500 to 1,500 jobs, according to a report by the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C., that is critical of minimum wage hikes. Its study on San Jose was backed by the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce and the California Restaurant Association.
The San Jose minimum wage proposal is based on one adopted in 2004 in San Francisco, where the annual cost-of-living raises have the bottom wage this year at $10.24 an hour. That is the highest minimum required by any city in the country.
A study of San Francisco's wage increase cited in the debate said that San Francisco's forced raise did not hurt the local economy or its businesses. That study was conducted by the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley.
In San Jose, the efforts to raise the minimum wage were launched about a year ago by San Jose State University sociology Professor Scott Myers-Lipton and his students. The campaign to collect signatures for the ballot measure was financed in large part by the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council.
For more information, visit http://raisethewagesj.com. Support!
Work Cited: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2012/05/23/san-jose-puts-minimum-wage-hike-on.html?page=all
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