Activist: Pasadena Events Affected California Assembly’s Decision to Pass Minimum Wage Bill

A local activist who led the recent Pasadenans for a Livable Wage campaign to raise the minimum wage here in Pasadena said today that the Pasadena City Council’s passage of a city-wide raise on March 14 certainly helped convince the California Assembly to consider a statewide minimum wage increase.

California’s state assembly Thursday passed a bill that could create the highest minimum wage in the nation – $15 an hour by 2022. The assembly passed the bill a day after Gov. Jerry Brown sent it to the legislature, announcing it was the result of a deal reached Saturday by state legislators and labor union representatives.

Occidental College professor Dr. Peter Dreier, who was recently named Pasadena’s “2015 Progressive of the Year” for his work on raising the minimum wage in Pasadena,  said what happened here played a role in Sacramento.

“People don’t look at Pasadena as a ‘lefty’ city, they look at us as a moderate city,” Dreier said. “And if Pasadena can pass a minimum wage law, then it says that the public opinion is on the side of raising wages. And in fact, the most recent national poll showed that 63 percent of the American public supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.”

Dreier, said the state assembly’s action Thursday was a result of citizens’ activism that started years ago in many California cities including Pasadena.

“This did not happen out of the blue,” Dreier said. “This was the result of several years of grassroots organizing by minimum wage workers at McDonald’s and Walmart and other corporations that have been pushed to raise their own minimum wages, and the battles in cities all over the country, particularly in California, in Berkeley and San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego and Emeryville and Santa Monica and Pasadena, all these cities that have adopted their own minimum wages. So this was how movements work. You get the Governor and the State Government, the State Legislature responding to pressure and protest, and it’s what they’ve done. So this wouldn’t happen, in other words, without the hard work and protest and organizing of people at the grassroots level for California.”

Dreier said with the measure, the state has avoided having to bring the minimum wage issue before the voters, which would have meant “hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending for and against a ballot measure.”

Pasadena’s City Council unanimously approved a motion to adopt its new minimum wage ordinance, following a formal “second reading” of the measure on March 14, 2016. The new wage increase would begin in July, with a minimum wage of $10.50. It would then climb every year to 2018, when it would be $13.25. The impact of the ordinance on the local economy would then be reviewed by the City Council in February 2019, for continuing on to its eventual goal of $15 an hour in 2020. Future raises beyond 2020 would be indexed to annual cost of living adjustments.

Dreier added California wouldn’t have to busy itself with having to pass a minimum wage bill if the U.S. Congress weren’t gridlocked and the federal minimum wage wasn’t stuck at $7.25 for the last five years.

“Because of that, states all over the country have been raising their own minimum wages and dozens of cities around the country have been doing the same thing and Pasadena’s part of that broader movement,” Dreier said.

Former Pasadena City Councilmember and current State Assemblymember Chris Holden agreed, saying today that “with the gridlock in the nation’s Capital, California has once again shown it can lead.”

The California bill will now go to the state senate for consideration.