Throughout his professional career, Barry Hermanson has advocated for the rights of low-wage workers wherever he saw an opportunity. But even though his temporary employment service gave workers more of a cut of their paycheck than the norm, he didn’t think that he was doing enough. “I took a look at the impact that I had with my business, and it was nothing compared to what could be done legislatively,” he says. So last March he left the business he’d operated for twenty-five years to devote his energy to passing a statewide “Fair Wage Initiative,” which would raise California’s minimum wage and lay the groundwork for future increases. Hermanson is also running for California state assembly in San Francisco’s 12th district as a Green on a platform of progressive economics.
Californians for Fair Wages, a committee formed by proponents of raising the minimum wage, is currently considering two versions of the initiative. The more modest initiative, which would raise the state’ s minimum wage from $6.75 to $7.75, enjoys widespread support from California voters. An alternative would raise the minimum wage another dollar to $8.75 and likely face much more opposition from the business community. Both proposals lay the groundwork for future increases based on inflation. If organizers can gather 370,000 valid signatures from registered voters by the May deadline, the chosen initiative would go to voters on the November ballot.
The issue is gaining steam throughout the state—in his State of the State address last Thursday, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed raising the minimum wage by $1. The only difference between his proposal and the more modest “Fair Wage Initiative” is that the initiative would index the minimum wage to inflation, an idea Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed.
Hermanson says that while low-wage workers face particular difficulty in areas with a high cost of living, such as the Bay Area, the problem is universal. He projected that either initiative would impact at least 2 million workers.
“There’s a myth that minimum wage workers are young people and they don’t need more money,” he says.
According to the California Budget Project, a Sacramento think tank for fiscal issues, a California two-parent family needs each parent to bring in $15.37 an hour—more than twice the state’s minimum wage—to achieve a “modest standard of living.” In the Bay Area, the cost is even higher: an hourly wage of more than $22.
The current push to raise the minimum wage comes on the heels of two successful San Francisco campaigns. In 2000, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a “living wage” ordinance, which requires city contractors to pay workers a wage higher than the minimum. In addition, two years ago, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition L, which raised the city’s minimum wage to $8.50 an hour. Hermanson played a major role in each campaign—for Proposition L, he was campaign treasurer and a major donor.
The living wage campaign was a groundbreaking victory for fair wage activists who wanted to build a movement up from the local level to avoid going head-to-head against national business interests with more resources.
“Because there was so much resistance on the part of the business community to raising the minimum wage, a tactic was to look at the local level,” he says. “We just don’t have as much strength as a national movement.”
Though the every member of the board of supervisors initially opposed the measure, organizers used public pressure to push the initiative through.
“When we said we expect that anyone who works full time ought to be able to support themselves without support from charities or public subsidies, there’s no possible response from the business community, ” he says. “A living wage has become part of the vocabulary.”
Hermanson says that the two campaigns demonstrated to him what cost businesses could reasonably bear. A UC Berkeley study showed that more than 80 percent of businesses wouldn’t see significant increases in cost if the minimum wage were to be raised to $8.50, so campaign leaders knew that they wouldn’t face much opposition.
“We did our homework ahead of time,” he says. “I was president of my neighborhood business association and I drew no reaction. The business community essentially was told by leaders not to oppose it because that initiative polled well.”
Of course, Hermanson anticipates that the California business community will be able to bring more pressure than the successful local campaigns faced, so Californians for Fair Wages is carefully considering which proposal has the best chance of passing in November.
“I don’t think that you can play around with the lives of people who are making minimum wage,” he says. “When I go out into communities of color to try and gather signatures, I want something real, I don’t want an ideal.”
