San Diego Free Press

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Living the Wage is Indeed a Challenge in San Diego

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Live the WageBy Todd Gloria / President, San Diego City Council

My morning ritual on most days is to buy a cup of my favorite coffee in Hillcrest. This week I did not do that. I couldn’t because I was trying to live on the minimum wage. After paying for housing and taxes, I had $51 left to spend on all my expenses including food and transportation. This meant carefully considering how to spend every penny, and I couldn’t afford my morning coffee.

My reduced consumption wasn’t limited to coffee. I knew this challenge would require a drastic reduction in what I was able to contribute to the local economy.  I didn’t eat out this week. I didn’t dry clean my clothes. I skipped washing my car. The businesses that I did patronize saw far less of my money than they would in an average week.

As I struggled to live on $51 for one week, I didn’t lose sight of the fact that this is just an experiment for me. For thousands of San Diegans, roughly 38% of us, this is their life every single day.

Those who want to repeal San Diego’s minimum wage claim that raising wages will do great harm to local businesses. The truth is that reducing consumption because of obscenely low wages does a great deal of harm for our economy and workers as well.

When I ran out of razors this week, it was cause for panic. I know razors are an expensive toiletry, but I’ve never considered them to be a luxury. It gave me a far better understanding of the stress and fear that is constantly present in minimum wage households. I had to make do with a dull razor for a few days, but I know that I have the capacity to spend money and buy more next week.  That isn’t the case for 172,000 of my neighbors.

San Diego’s new minimum wage is expected to pump $260 million into our local economy. This comes from workers who would now be able to afford to buy the goods and services they need. They could now buy badly needed new shoes for their child. They might event be able to consider having an occasional meal at a local restaurant that is otherwise prohibited by their hourly wage.  That could generate a lot of new customers for local businesses.

The minimum wage opponents also make broad statements that suggest that low wage workers ought to work harder to get out of their present circumstances. Implicit in this advice is that belief that the poor are lazy and lack skills. Nothing is further from the truth. Just the constant budgeting to the penny to keep expenses in check demonstrates a skill I believe many San Diegans are fortunate enough to ignore during weekly grocery shopping.

Being poor in San Diego requires you to work incredibly hard. It means getting up early to catch a bus to work. It often means working multiple jobs to make ends meet. It requires doing without necessities the rest of us couldn’t live without. It requires a resourcefulness that is impressive but ultimately exhausting. This grind rarely leaves anything left over to help a family get ahead. It doesn’t have to be this way.

As the son of a hotel maid and a gardener, I grew up poor and I grew up witnessing that my parents’ hard work in low wage jobs led to better opportunities. I worry that my family’s story is less possible today. Over the years, the minimum wage hasn’t kept up with the cost of living. Simultaneously, the fastest growing sectors in our economy are predominantly low wage jobs like fast food, retail and some in the tourism sector. There are fewer opportunities to climb the economic ladder that leads to the middle class.

Those with money and power, some of whom are using both to stop our efforts to increase the minimum wage, seem to favor an economy that keeps low wage workers in low wage jobs. Hard working families are now expected to reduce their dreams for themselves and their families. It can’t stay this way. Our ordinance is a step toward reversing that.

The increase in the minimum wage and provision of paid sick days will give 279,000 San Diegans a fighting chance to get ahead. For these San Diegans, the challenge of living on minimum wage isn’t about getting through the day without their favorite coffee.  It’s about putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads and allowing them to believe and work for better for themselves and their families.

At Large

At Large

Comments

  1. Thank you for sharing and describing the experiences hundreds of thousands of San Diegans live with every day. Living in poverty is stressful. Fewer dollars often means fewer opportunities to relax and enjoy our beautiful city- or participate in the political process to improve their own situation.

    You note “Those with money and power, some of whom are using both to stop our efforts to increase the minimum wage, seem to favor an economy that keeps low wage workers in low wage jobs. ”

    The fact is the “money and power” cabal have disempowered elected official such as yourself through an abuse of ballot measures that pass via deception and misrepresentation of basic facts. In most any other circumstance these tactics would be illegal, and carry dire consequences for those who employ them. But in the current initiative qualification process this is not the case: Signature gatherers and their employers can lie and deceive with no impact on the outcome.

    Clearly it’s time for the Ethics Commission to review the impacts of the initiative process in our city. If ever there was a need for basic ethical behavior it is in this “pay to play” system that claims to be democratic but in fact is selling a twisted version of democracy to the highest bidder.

  2. I second Lori Saldana’s emotion. There needs to be a change in the laws that aloww paid signature gatherers and the people who pay them to subvert democratic intentions. The initiative process needs to be changed so that monied interests can’t get anything they want on the ballot and then spend millions on TV ads to convince the voters to vote their way. This is democracy? I don’t think so.

    Kudos to you Todd Gloria for dramatizing the minimum wage fight. I applaud you for getting involved on a personal basis and also the other City Council members who have confronted the signature gatherers.

  3. How ’bout we all spend only $51 per day on food, transport, bill-paying, entertainment and so on, for a week? Call it Poverty by the Sea, or Fast Food Diego. A pledge week of denial would demonstrate that we’re all in this economy together, owners and customers. The drop in business citywide would make it clear that when the people don’t have money the market suffers.
    Let’s give Todd Gloria credit for a lastingly good idea.

    • But…that’s $51 per WEEK, not per DAY.

      10 years ago I used to give presentations on life in Baja, and point out min wage in CA was $7/hour, and in Baja it was $7 DAY.

      10 years ago people often “heard” the same thing: I had to repeat wages per DAY vs wages per HOUR a few times before it sank in: people in San Diego were paid 8X what workers in Baja typically made.

      The gap is closing. Now it’s about $300 pesos/day, ($25US mas or menos, or $3 US per hour). So while wages in MX have increased considerably in 10 years, wages in the US… stagnant.

      • And Lori, the cost of living in places like Mexico City is still as high as it is in San Diego, and it one of the most expensive cities in Latin America. It is still low enough that the companies that went to China, becuase Mexican workers are too expensive, are now starting to come back.

        It is just absolutely crazy and people really do not have a concept. There are people right now, living in their cars and working three jobs, because the rent in San Diego is that damn high.

  4. Seems the original minimum wage was intended to prevent abuse of low-wage earners, but the real abuse is that the minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation…and has itself become a source of worker abuse. However, the same can be said for Social Security, Medicare and most other social programs. When a corporation can reduce or eliminate worker retirement benefits, the entire system needs to change. Corporations are out of control.

  5. I had hopes Todd might talk about the high cost of that public transit he might have had to use. That’s a significant portion of that $51. And the MTS is something on which he can have a direct effect as a Councilmember, but a discussion of reducing that cost rarely seems to make it to the table.

    • Public transit is an important issue, David. Todd did mention it in one of his tweets–he couldn’t afford to buy a bus pass. There are families in my neighborhood which depend upon transit to get to work and their kids depend upon transit to get to school (and often work too). Family members try to trade off one bus pass among them; too many people are forced to pay as they go, which is much more expensive. The MTD board had never considered that this was a serious issue for low income, transit dependent residents, when it was pointed out to them years ago and they have not come up with a way to address the issue.

  6. Personally I think everyone in office should be required to live on minimum wage while in office.

    One gets to recognize that even toilet paper can look like a luxury.

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