15,500 Signatures Submitted for Living Wage Initiative

By Jorge Casuso

Sponsors of the nation's first business-backed living wage initiative on Thursday turned in to the City Clerk nearly double the number of signatures necessary to qualify the measure for the November ballot.

After a contentious two-month-long signature gathering effort, Santa Monicans for a Living Wage submitted 15,500 signatures, far more than the 8,100 (15 percent of the city's 54,000 registered voters) needed to place a charter amendment on the ballot.

The measure - which is similar to living wage laws in three dozen other municipalities -- requires businesses that receive contracts and subsidies from the city to pay workers at least $8.32-an-hour with health benefits. But Santa Monica's initiative is the only measure that would erase any wage laws the City Council might pass - now or in the future.

"It should be enough to qualify," said Tom Larmore, who heads the Living Wage Task Force for the Chamber of Commerce, which backs the measure. "What it says is people responded to the argument that they should get a chance to vote on this. People recognize that this is an important issue."

The signatures should be enough to counter a revocation campaign mounted by opponents of the measure, who successfully urged 1,049 people to remove their names from the petition. The City Clerk still must verify the revocations against the signatures.

"They (the consultants) did a lot more work than you normally do to verify the signatures," Larmore said. "You figure you got to assume some percentage aren't going to be good and you don't know how many revocations are going to be good."

Opponents of the initiative - who back a proposal crafted by Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism (SMART) that targets hotels and restaurants in the city's lucrative coastal zone - said they were not surprised by the number of signatures submitted. They noted that the initiative's sponsors raised more than $100,000 in less than two months (SMART raised $80,000) and reportedly paid signature gatherers as much as $20 per signature in the final weeks of the campaign.

"I don't think it's a measure of any kind of support," said Vivian Rothstein, an organizer for SMART. "It's a measure of what you can buy if you have a lot of money. It doesn't discourage me. I'm not surprised at all.

"Those signatures are not from people who support their proposal," Rothstein said. "They're from people who were manipulated. They misrepresented themselves."

SMART contends that their proposal would cover about 3,000 low-wage workers along the coast, while the business-backed initiative would cover about 200 workers citywide in businesses with municipal contracts (businesses on city owned land would be exempt).

City Manager Susan McCarthy said Thursday that staff is preparing an analysis of how many workers the initiative would cover. The study should be released in the next few weeks.

The submission of the signatures - which will now be turned over to the Los Angeles County Registrar for signature verification and official qualification - caps one of the most expensive and fiercely waged political wars since rent control became law two decades ago.

As soon as signature gatherers hit the street SMART - backed by the local Hotel Empoyees and Restaurant Employees union --immediately launched an offensive. They deployed "Truth Teams" to city's supermarket parking lots to dissuade voters from signing petitions for the ballot measure.

The submission of signatures also signals a likely lull before the beginning of round two, as the City Council prepares to study SMART's proposal. Robert Pollin - a Massachusetts economics professor and living wage advocate who submitted the only bid to study the proposal's impacts -- is expected to turn in a draft of the report by the end of the month.

Larmore expects the council will explore several options, including placing a competing measure on the ballot.

"It's going to be kind of quiet until Pollin's report comes back," Larmore said. "It'll be interesting to see what the council does. They expect to put up their own measure. That's what I expect."

Rothstein believes the business backed initiative drive will backfire, eliminating any possibility of a compromise measure.

"Now they have this ax hanging over our head and there's no reason to be conciliatory or compromising," Rothstein said. "How can there be a negotiating environment? They've lost an opportunity here They cut off their nose to spite their face."

Larmore has said that any chance of negotiations were ruined when Pollin - who literally wrote the book on the benefits of a living wage -- was hired to conduct the study.

The proposed charter amendment - which can only be changed or overridden at the ballot box - would:

• Require employers who receive at least $25,000 in City contracts for services to pay their workers a living wage of at least $8.32 an hour with health benefits, or $9.46 without, closely mirroring Los Angeles County's law.
• Require employers who receive direct City financial assistance for economic development or job growth of $100,000 in any year or $25,000 or more on a continuing basis the same living wage.
• Adjust annually the living wage to compensate for inflation by tying it to the Consumer Price Index for the Los Angeles area.
• Require all covered employers to provide their workers with at least 12 paid and 10 unpaid days off.
• Require covered employers to inform their eligible workers of their right to the Earned Income Credit, a federal tax credit. Proponents say it would mean thousands of dollars in cash back for working families.
• Generally prohibit the City from establishing wage or benefit levels for private employers, and require any ordinances establishing wage or benefit levels for private employers to be submitted to voters.
• Exempt non-for profits and businesses on city owned land.