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Many Gains Towards Bigger Victories This Year This past year, the Living Wage Coalition has achieved many successes but there is still much work to do. Among our legislative victories, we were able to get the Supervisors to pass legislation that for the first time included workfare workers in the living wage law. This reduced the number of hours of work required of workfare workers in GA and PAES to qualify for their monthly grant from 32 hours per month to 30 hours per month. We contributed to getting the supervisors to budget money to raise the wages of non-profit workers to $10.50 per hour and to $10.65 per hour for 13,000 home care workers. Because of annual cost-of-living increases in the city Minimum Wage Ordinance which we campaigned for in 2004, the minimum wage in San Francisco went up to $9.14 an hour on January 1 for all workers.
We are continuing to campaign to get that same kind of annual cost-of-living increase in the Minimum Compensation Ordinance to bring up the wages of private sector and non-profit workers who provide services to city residents. In the campaign to raise wages for non-profit workers, home care workers and workfare workers, we outreached to GA and PAES workfare workers, CalWORKs parents, non-profit workers, and churches, and collected more than 800 signed petitions and generated hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls to supervisors. We built a strong alliance with Church Women United and workers from the Multi-Service Center South, the City's largest homeless shelter. We trained speakers to present testimony at supervisors hearings and organized delegations of workers and supporters to supervisor's offices. Members were interviewed on KPFA radio and wrote articles for the Bay View National Black Newspaper and the Street Sheet. In the struggle to expand health care coverage, we met for more than a year with representatives from the Department of Public Health and the San Francisco Health Plan, and showed them that a city-administered health program was feasible. We contributed to pressuring the Department of Public Health Director Mitch Katz to support the concept of a city-administered health program and contributed to the historic passage of the San Francisco Health Access Program, which is serving as a model to the rest of the nation on how to cover people without health insurance. Our members contributed to getting the Department of Public Health to complete a funding study for a health care plan for San Francisco's 5,000-plus taxi drivers, and during contract negotiations between SEIU and the Mayor's Office, getting the City to commit $4.5 million over the next three years so that 1,200 part-time city workers such as library aides, custodians and health workers will receive health benefits. The organizing principle of the Living Wage Coalition is to develop the leadership of low-wage workers. Towards that end, we trained low-wage workers to increase public awareness about the issues impacting low-wage workers and to build the workers movement for economic justice. The following are some of our accomplishments: Workshops - We sponsored workshops to develop the skills of low-wage workers. We had workshop on planning creative actions, facilitated by Karen Sherr; on designing leaflets, facilitated by Russell Kilday-Hicks; on TV show and video production, facilitated by Carl Bryant; and on theater, facilitated by Alice Rogoff. Cultural Activities - We sponsored an art exhibit for Latino artists called "Si, Se Puede: expressions of Latino Culture." We held a sing out at City Hall with the Rockin Solidarity Labor Heritage Chorus and the Freedom Song Network. We had a performance of street theater outside of City Hall that provided a satirical expose of the corrupt influence of the downtown corporations in fighting policies to raise wages. Public Education - We produced a quarterly newsletter and a monthly TV show on Channel 29. Civic Participation - We published and distributed a report card on supervisorial candidates positions on living wage issues, providing voters valuable information on who are the candidates on the side of low-wage workers. |
