Santa Monica has a pretty typical living wage ordinance. Yay. All businesses receiving contracts from the city must provide a living wage of at least $11.50 (2004 dollars) to their staff. This vaguely controversial concept was put in place after a much more unique living wage ordinance was proposed, passed, and repealed in 2000-2002 that, for a brief time, required all major businesses in downtown Santa Monica, specifically the big hotels on and near the beach, to offer a living wage, and encouraged those businesses to offer health care as well. The hotels rebelled, and funded a $400,000 campaign to repeal via a referendum proposition, which passed, barely. This applies to the documented workforce only, of course.
I can't decide whether to be proud of my more-liberal-than-the-neighborhood city or saddened that the business interests (boo hiss big business) succeeded at overturning the more expansive law. Certainly I wouldn't want to try to live on the $8.00/hour California minimum wage, not anywhere on the Westside, not anywhere in LA, not anywhere in the US, really. But $11.50 doesn't sound much better, either. Incremental wage increases can make a real difference in lifestyle, like the difference between renting a garage and sleeping on a cot and renting a room in a house with a bed. Other policy changes can make real differences too, like increased access to health clinics, schools, and parks. Those seem like slightly harder problems to solve, particularly for a small, compact, wealthy town like Santa Monica that is far too expensive to live in on $11.50 an hour.
Yesterday's run destination: I ran a 5K! 21:04 in the Santa Monica Turkey Trot
Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: croissant quarters
lunch: turkey noodle soup
dinner: turkey pot pie and cheesy mashed potatoes
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