City Council voted unanimously Oct. 20 to put an incremental hike in the San Diego minimum wage to a public vote on the June 2016 primary election ballot.
Opponents of the wage hike had collected enough petition signatures to force the action on the minimum wage issue. Council could have repealed the ordinance themselves or scheduled an earlier, but costly, special election.
The three-stage hike would have resulted in the lowest pay in the city being set at $11.50 an hour by January of 2017. The ordinance, adopted on a 6-3 party-line vote in July, also required employers to offer five annual days of paid sick leave.
Opponents contended that raising the minimum wage above the state standard of $9 an hour would make San Diego’s businesses less competitive with enterprises in neighboring cities.
Former Mayor Jerry Sanders, head of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, had called for the repeal of the “bad policy, which will make it harder for our 45,000 unemployed to find jobs, drive up the cost of goods and services and make it more difficult for the very businesses that we rely on to create jobs to succeed.”
City Council needs to “fight for San Diego’s job creators or, at minimum, listen to them,” Sanders said.
Council President Todd Gloria, who first raised the issue in January, called the wage hike “a necessary, common-sense measure” to help the estimated 38 percent of San Diegans who can’t afford to make ends meet without government assistance.
“It’s disappointing,” Gloria said, “that big businesses have used their money and misinformation to block thousands of San Diegans from receiving five earned sick days and a pay raise this January.”
Councilwoman Sherri Lightner blamed a “loud, disingenuous and well-funded opposition” for blocking implementation of the ordinance.
The action raised two major questions that need to be resolved. Voters will decide on the language of the ordinance when it was passed, which calls for the first of three raises and the sick days to be effective Jan. 1. Also, a representative of the mayor’s office asked that if the state of California scheduled its 2016 presidential primary election earlier than June, as it sometimes does, whether the minimum wage vote would take place at that time or be set for June 2016 no matter what.
City Attorney Jan Goldsmith said both issues would be studied. – City News Service