Come New Year’s Day, many hourly workers in the Bay Area will see their pay increase, as several cities in the region are set to implement new minimum wage levels that will start at no less than $15 an hour.
According to a report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP), on Jan. 1, 13 cities and towns across the region will raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour, or higher.
Local cities that will boost their minimum wage to $15 an hour include Belmont, which will go up from $13.50 an hour; Menlo Park, which will raise its minimum wage from its current levels of $12 an hour for large employers and $11 an hour for small employers; Petaluma and South San Francisco, where workers at large employers will get a bump to $15 an hour from both cities’ current $12-an-hour minimum wage, and employees at small companies will go to a minimum of $14 an hour from $11 an hour, and San Mateo, which will lift the minimum pay for employees at non-profit organizations to $15.38 an hour from the current minimum wage of $13.50 an hour. San Mateo already has a $15-an-hour minimum wage for what it calls “standard” employees, and those workers will also get a bump to at least $15.38 an hour.
Yannet Lathrop, a research and policy analyst at NELP, said one of the main reasons so many states and local municipalities are raising their minimum wages is because of minimum wage inaction on the federal level. The last time the federal government raised the national minimum wage was in 2009, when it set a minimum wage across the country of $7.25 an hour.
“That federal rate has stayed unchanged for a decade,” Lathrop said, “during which (time) the cost of housing has risen faster than inflation, the cost of health care and prescription drugs have skyrocketed, and the cost of food and other basic necessities have also increased.”
Lathrop said that a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour has passed the U.S. House of Representatives, but remains stuck in the Senate, where she said Sen Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is refusing to advance the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.
“Until this changes, states and cities will probably continue to raise wages on their own,” Lathrop said.
Another reason state and local governments are raising workers’ minimum earnings, Lathrop said, is in response to the “Fight for $15” movement, a series of protests which have led many cities to view $15 an hour as a baseline for a worker’s living wage.
“Once Fight for $15 took a hold of the public’s imagination, and began building momentum, an increasing number of local jurisdictions started aiming for a $15 minimum wage,” Lathrop said.
In California, the statewide mandated minimum wage will go to $13 a hour from $12 an hour for large employers, and to $12 an hour from $11 an hour for small employers, as plans progress for a statewide $15-an-hour minimum wage to be implemented by 2022-2023. Lathrop said that in California, a small employer is typically considered one with 25 employees or less, while large employers are defined as those with 26 or more workers.
In addition to the cities and towns raising their minimum wages to $15 an hour, several area locales will be boosting how much workers will earn beyond their current $15-an-hour minimum marks. Those include:
• Cupertino, which will go from $15 to $15.35 an hour.
• El Cerrito, up to $15.37 from $15 an hour.
• Los Altos, Palo Alto and Santa Clara, all of which will boost their minimum hourly wages from $15 to $15.40.
• Mountain View and Sunnyvale, where the hourly minimum wage in both cities is set to increase to $16.05 an hour from $15.65.
• San Jose, which will go from a minimum wage of $15 an hour to $15.25 an hour.
Other cities that will raise their minimum wages on Jan. 1, but won’t reach the $15-an-hour level include Oakland, which is slated to go to a minimum wage of $14.14 an hour from $13.80 an hour, and Daly City, where the minimum wage of $12 an hour will go to $13.75 an hour.