Long Beach will decide next month whether to place a minimum wage increase for employees at public health care institutions on the ballot or adopt the measure outright, after an economic impact report is returned to the City Council.
A petition seeking to raise the minimum wage for all workers at public health care facilities to $25 per hour was certified by Los Angeles County election officials this month, meaning the council now has two options: Let voters decide on Nov. 7, or approve the ballot language as a city ordinance with zero changes.
The citywide minimum wage in Long Beach is $15 per hour for large companies and $14 per hour for companies with fewer than 25 employees.
The Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) is pushing the petition, which says workers ranging from technicians to those in food service have been underpaid while working through the pandemic as essential workers.
“Just because you’re short (in staff) doesn’t mean you’re not going to feed two floors of patients,” said Kimberly Estrada, a food service worker at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center. “We get it done because we have to; we care about our patients.”
A coalition of health care providers including MemorialCare, St. Mary and others in the region say the effort is unjust because it unfairly targets private health care facilities and would pay those employees more than workers at public institutions doing the same job.
“It excludes the majority of...
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