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On Tuesday, San Franciscans voted to raise their city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour for all workers by 2018, making it the highest in the country. While Seattle was ahead of San Francisco with its city council adopting a $15 minimum wage this June, that law will not fully take effect until 2021, and contains exceptions.
“Seattle inspired everybody,” said Alysabeth Alexander, vice president of SEIU Local 1021, which has 54,000 members across Northern California and played a large role in the San Francisco campaign. “It set the bar.”
These two progressive West Coast cities took different paths. In San Francisco, the union worked with other community partners to push for higher wages. Early in the year, the coalition began gathering signatures for the ballot initiative and building a ground campaign.
Advocates in Seattle, in contrast, went directly to the city council. The mayor then put together a committee made up mostly of business leaders, and its final bill contained several loopholes, including delaying the law for small businesses.
Alexander said organizers learned from what happened in Seattle as well as from other cities in the Bay Area.
“Figure out where your bottom line is and start organizing first,” Alexander said. “If you have the ability to get it on the ballot, start gathering the signatures yourself to get it on the ballot. Otherwise, if you look at what happened in the city of Berkeley and the city of Richmond, where it just went through a city council process, they weren’t able to get consensus on a solid measure, so there’s a lot of carve-outs, a lot of exemptions, and they are very, very confusing measures.”
San Francisco’s new minimum wage law, which was adopted via the ballot initiative process, is quite simple. The wage will increase from its current $10.74 to $11 on January 1, $12.25 on May 1, $13 in 2016, $14 in 2017 and reach $15 in 2018. There will be an annual cost-of-living increase afterward. There are no carve-outs for small businesses, tipped workers, etc. Their essential goal was to get to $15 fast.