Building a Better Airport: Living wage campaign steps up this Monday

The drive for a Living Wage for all workers at Mineta San Jose International Airport is poised to move ahead on Monday, when the living wage proposal will be heard by the Transportation & Environment Committee of the San Jose City Council.

If all goes well, Monday's hearing will put the policy on track for the final step -- the full City Council -- to raise service standards at the Airport and give over five hundred workers a much-needed raise.

Below is an article on the Airport Living Wage from today's Partnership for Working Families newsletter.


Working Partnerships USA Launches Campaign to Extend Living Wage to San Jose International Airport

Last month, community, labor and faith leaders came together to call for the City of San Jose to assure that it is truly building a better airport -- by ensuring a living wage, establishing increased oversight of subcontractors, and guaranteeing the highest quality, most skilled employees serving the airport's millions of annual passengers.

Stemming from a report by Working Partnerships USA which documented alarming security and retention challenges at Mineta San Jose International Airport, Vice Mayor Dave Cortese and Councilmember Forrest Williams asked the Council's Transportation committee to consider extending a living wage to all airport employees. The report found that over half of airport employees responding to a survey weren't trained in critical emergency procedures, such as facility evacuation. Additionally, while over half of employees earning a living wage had been at the Airport for over three years, the percentage of those earning less who remained that long was 6% or lower.

Members of the community joined elected officials in support of the policy. Pastor Kenny Foreman, of the Cathedral of Faith in Willow Glen, stated:

Our City has been richly blessed, and now should continue its leadership in maintaining the standard that has already been set; ensuring that San Jose will continue to lead the way in providing employees that serve the City a living wage -- including everyone who works at the San Jose Mineta Airport.

(Continued...)

Wheelchair attendant Dwayne Green, an employee at the airport who earns a minimum wage, related his story, including being forced into homelessness for an inability to afford even a basic rent. "I struggled, I fought, and today I see a brighter future. For our safety, we can't afford to churn through employees," Green stated. "The City I live in and love cannot afford to lose good employees simply because they can't afford to live here, to have families."

Dr. Steven Pitts of UC Berkeley relayed the findings of a study conducted by researchers following San Francisco's application of a living wage to its airport. The study found that the living wage did not negatively impact the function of the airport, and that cost to employers was less than a penny on the dollar. In fact, due to decreases in employee turn-over, some employers saw cost savings of up to 11%.

The Living Wage campaign will be discussed at the San Jose City Council's Transportation and Environment Committee on June 2nd and will likely go before the full City Council in the fall.

Copies of the Working Partnerships report, the UC Berkeley study and event photos can be found at the campaign website: http://www.buildingabetterairport.com/


Working Partnerships USA is a public policy and research institute that builds partnerships with community groups, labor unions, and faith based organizations to improve the lives of working families in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit the WPUSA website at http://www.wpusa.org/.

[ Continue reading Building a Better Airport: Living wage campaign steps up this Monday ]

How to fight back against the middle-class squeeze? Form a union, says new study

With wages for most workers failing to keep up with the cost of living, families in Silicon Valley, California and throughout the nation are feeling the "middle-class squeeze": working hard but unable to make ends meet.

Perhaps the most at risk are families who have been squeezed right out of the middle class -- trapped in the low-wage, dead-end jobs that are increasingly becoming the only jobs available (a recent analysis concluded that only one out of every four jobs in the U.S. can be considered a "good job".)

How can a community (or a nation) reverse a trend like this, and turn its low-wage jobs back into good jobs? There's no single answer, but a new study performed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) makes a powerful case for the wage-raising effects of one strategy: unions.

CEPR looked at five years' worth of wages for union and nonunion workers in every state, adjusting for differences in education, age, experience, gender, and race to make sure they were comparing workers with similar characteristics. They broke it down further by examining the impact of unionization on workers at different wage levels.(Continued...)

Their findings:

• In every state and in the District of Columbia, unionization significantly improves workers' wages.


• Nationwide, low-wage workers gain the largest benefit from joining a union. The typical union wage premium for a low-wage worker (10th percentile wage level) is 20.7 percent: the equivalent of a raise from $10.00/hr.to $12.07/hr.


• In California:


• the lowest-wage workers (10th percentile) see a 16.5% wage increase from unionization;


• middle-wage workers (50th percentile) see a 15.9% wage increase;


• and higher-wage workers (90th percentile) see a 6.0% wage increase.

Unfortunately, joining a union isn't as easy as signing up on the dotted line. Workers who want to organize a union are usually subjected to intimidation, threats, harassment, mandatory anti-union meetings, or even being fired for speaking up (the latter is illegal, but it still happens, and even employers who get caught illegally firing employees for organizing don't face high enough penalties to be deterred.) The system currently in place, overseen by a National Labor Relations Board comprised of political appointees, is heavily slanted towards making it extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights while giving a free pass to unscrupulous employers, and indirectly penalizing those employers who try to treat their workers fairly and do the right thing.

Legislation currently in Congress, titled the Employee Free Choice Act, would help restore the rights that have been eroded by making it easier for a majority of employees in a workplace to form a union. Based on the findings of the CEPR study, this legislation would not only restore lost rights, but could also go a long way towards helping workers restore their eroded paychecks.

[ Continue reading How to fight back against the middle-class squeeze? Form a union, says new study ]

How much does it cost to raise a family in Santa Clara County?

The Insight Center just released the new Family Economic Self-Sufficiency Standard for 2008, which lays out how much it costs to maintain a basic standard of living for workers in every county in California.

Detailed tables with the cost of living in Santa Clara County can be found here (pdf). It's expensive -- okay, no surprise there -- but the Self-Sufficiency Standard shows us just how big that gap is between the cost of basic needs and what jobs actually pay.

A single parent with two kids could be working three full-time minimum-wage jobs and still not have enough to cover housing, food, health care, child care, transportation, and other necessities. No wonder our County's safety net services are strained beyond capacity: as taxpayers, we are subsidizing the social cost of low-wage work.

The list below shows the "self-sufficiency wage" for several different household types. This is the minimum wage needed to get by in Santa Clara County if you work full-time year-round, don't get any outside assistance, and have a minimally adequate standard of living (i.e., you live in an apartment with at least one bedroom for every two people, have enough to eat, and can get medical care when you need it):

• Single adult: $13.37/hr



• Single adult with one infant: $23.55/hr



• Two adults with one preschooler and one teenager (both parents working): $14.70/hr

And compare these to the median wages for some of the most common occupations in Silicon Valley:

• Retail salespersons (25,990 employees, largest single occupation in the region): $10.98/hr



• Office clerks (18.860 employees): $15.85/hr



• Cashiers (17,550 employees): $9.89/hr



• Janitors and cleaners (14,340 employees): $10.78/hr

(Continued...)
Keep in mind that self-sufficiency only measures whether a family can support themselves right now; it doesn't allow for costs of college education, retirement savings, unemployment, or other situations for which you might need to put some money aside. Also no meals out, entertainment, or vacations. But even at that minimum standard, too many jobs simply don't pay enough for a working family to make ends meet.

Here's a breakdown of the Self-Sufficiency Standard by budget item for a two-parent family with a preschooler and a teenager:

One more key point: the Self-Sufficiency Standard assumes that all working families are covered by job-based health insurance, which is increasingly not the case. Without access to job-based coverage, health care costs in the pie chart above shoot up from $348/month to an average $943/month, adding $7,140 to a family's annual expenses.

And of course this problem isn't confined to Silicon Valley. While the Valley does have some of the highest costs in the country, workers nationwide are feeling the sting of stagnant or declining real wages. We urgently need a new national direction towards economic policies that support families and make work pay. Check out EPI's Agenda for Shared Prosperity for some good ideas on how to make this happen.

[ Continue reading How much does it cost to raise a family in Santa Clara County? ]

Building a Better Airport

To counteract all the gloom and doom from the previous week, here's some good news: a new campaign for a living wage for all workers at San Jose Airport.

Last week, WPUSA released a report documenting alarming security and retention challenges at Mineta San Jose International Airport, stemming from the practice of subcontracting airport duties to workers who are paid minimum wage with no benefits or time off and receive little to no training on security procedures.

Community, labor and faith leaders have now come together to call on the City of San Jose to adopt a policy that assures a living wage for all workers at the Airport, along with improved oversight of job and training standards at subcontractors. (Continued...)

The rapidly rising cost of living in the San Jose region makes this campaign especially timely; surviving in Silicon Valley at minimum wage, difficult at the best of times, is becoming nearly impossible.

On the scale of the regional economy, establishing a comprehensive living wage policy will help to make San Jose Airport competitive with SFO and OAK, which have been gaining air passenger market share at the expense of SJC. Both of these neighboring airports have already implemented Living Wage policies. If San Jose does the same, it will help hundreds of workers and their families climb out of poverty, and could give the local economy -- particularly the visitor and retail sectors -- a boost that we badly need.

Find out more at the campaign website: Building a Better Airport.

[ Continue reading Building a Better Airport ]

Child Care Costs Skyrocket for Valley Families

Are families with kids being priced out of Santa Clara County?

A new report by the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network reveals that the average cost of care for one preschooler in the county is up to $10,597 per year, a 45 percent increase since 2001. Working parents are increasingly hard pressed to keep up with the cost (have you gotten a 45% raise recently?)

The first five years of a child's life are a time of critical intellectual, emotional and physical development. They learn to walk, talk, explore their world and interact socially with adults and other children.

Quality care and early childhood education may be the single most important investment we can make for our community's future. Research overwhelmingly shows that early education is critical to children's success in school and later on in life. Yet right now, kids, parents and providers are all suffering from the under-resourcing of child care and early education.

The cost for infant or toddler care is even further out of reach: $14,454 per year. A minimum wage earner working full-time makes just $15,600 per year. There's simply no way most low-wage workers can afford the market rate for quality child care.

Ironically, the people who are providing care and early education for our youngest kids are themselves in the ranks of low-wage workers. The median wage for child care workers in Silicon Valley is $11.41/hr. No wonder we've got such a shortage of child care (only 50,551 available slots for 195,871 kids, according to the Resource & Referral report.)

Over the next year our region will be making critical decisions about economic development, public budgets, and investments. A key topic in those discussions needs to be figuring out how to make early education work for all kids, parents, and providers.

[ Continue reading Child Care Costs Skyrocket for Valley Families ]