It also would have created a local Department of Fair Labor Practices to enforce the minimum wage and to develop rules dictating how that wage would apply to rideshare and delivery drivers. The measure proposed applying Portland’s wage law to gig workers as well as tipped workers, phasing out the tip credit that restaurants and other service businesses use to reduce the wage they’re required to pay servers and other service workers.īeyond raising the wage floor, the Portland law would have required that rideshare and delivery app companies such as DoorDash, Grubhub, Lyft Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., be classified as employers and their drivers classified as employees for the purposes of the city’s labor laws. That measure would have increased the local minimum wage to $18 per hour, up from $13 currently. Voters in Portland, Maine, rejected the minimum wage proposal on their ballots by a margin of 61% to 39%. The measure would require hotels to pay their workers at least $18 an hour, with the rate scheduled to increase annually until it reached $22 in 2026. In Laguna Beach, Calif., it was hotel workers whose minimum wage proposal faced grim prospects, with voters rejecting it by a margin of 68.8% to 31.2% in initial results released Wednesday morning. “The $25 minimum wage would really help to keep these workers in these hospitals.” We are competing with fast food and Target and retail for these low-paid workers,” she said. Now lower-paid workers such as nursing assistants can make more money in other industries without any specialized training. Hospitals and other facilities were already struggling with staffing shortages before Covid-19, and the pandemic only made it worse, Saldaña said. Voters could consider similar ballot measures in future years in Downey, Long Beach, Monterey Park, and Los Angeles, after some of their city councils approved health-care worker ordinances but opponents blocked them by filing petitions for a voter referendum, she said. The measures are part of a broader push to raise health-care worker wages in California, said Renée Saldaña, a spokeswoman for the SEIU’s United Healthcare Workers West, which is backing the measures. A similar measure was failing in nearby Duarte, Calif., with 64% voting ‘no’ in those Wednesday morning results. Voters there supported a proposal requiring private-sector hospitals and clinics to pay workers at least $25 an hour by a margin of 53.5% to 46.5% as of Wednesday morning’s incomplete vote count. Inglewood City, Calif., appears an exception to the election-night trend of local wage measures struggling to get traction. “Their trend tends to be targeting one industry for a specific minimum wage target and then trying to apply it broadly from there,” he said. He pointed as an example to Fight for $15 organizers’ initial focus on the fast-food industry, after which they shifted to pushing for universal $15 minimum wages in cities and states. California WagesĮfforts to pass higher minimum wages for specific industries are part of labor unions’ playbook, said Michael Saltsman, managing director for the conservative-leaning Employment Policies Institute. Nebraska voters approved a plan to phase in a $15 minimum by 2026, and voters in the District of Columbia approved a proposal to phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers, meaning they’ll qualify for the full minimum wage by 2027. Statewide minimum wage proposals fared better than local initiatives on election night. The California results weren’t final, however, as a large number of mail-in ballots still need to be counted, spokespeople in the Los Angeles County and Orange County elections offices said on Wednesday afternoon. Voters rejected the Portland measure, and two of three California proposals were on track to fail as of Wednesday morning. The proposals faced vocal opposition from the industries that would be affected, including hospitals fighting the California measures and the restaurant industry- along with rideshare and delivery app companies-fighting the Maine proposal. A Portland, Maine, ballot measure would have raised the wage floor for all workers, while also extending the minimum wage to cover tipped workers and independent contractors. The California measures proposed to raise minimum wages in unusually industry-specific ways. A set of local minimum wage proposals appeared to fare poorly in initial ballot-box results Tuesday, as voters considered industry-specific pay increases for health-care, hotel, gig, and service workers in California and Maine cities.
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