Editor, Index-Tribune:
Perhaps the only legitimate question about Larry Barnett’s recently proposed, $15-per-hour minimum wage ordinance for Sonoma, is whether $15 is enough.
Beyond doubt, however, it would be a welcome and long-overdue income boost for many who form the backbone of Sonoma’s economy. Such an ordinance, including a cost-of-living escalator, should be a major topic for candidates in this year’s City Council election, and placed on the council’s agenda for a vote at the earliest opportunity.
As of July 1, the minimum wage floor provided by law for most of those who labor in Sonoma’s retail shops, hotels, tasting rooms, wineries and many other businesses, is only $9 per hour. It goes to $10 in 2016. After that, nothing.
Local prices for food, shelter, clothing, healthcare and transportation suggest that in today’s economy, such low wages – even for a single person with no dependents – border on exploitation. Add a child, and life for both becomes grim indeed. Even with a full-time job, there’s little or nothing left for holidays, savings, college tuition, wine tasting, NASCAR tickets or the dignity that supposedly comes from hard work.
Fifteen dollars an hour will not catapult anyone into the hammock of leisure enjoyed by many in our community. But it would improve – however modestly – the daily circumstances of those at the bottom. That improvement would also immediately “trickle up” to benefit local businesses and in so doing generate more sales taxes for the city.
Those workers aren’t George Romney’s mythically lazy, “entitled” 47 percent. They are friends and neighbors, decent people of our community who aren’t trying to live on what they earn as much as they’re trying to survive on it, and in one of the most expensive places on earth. As much as those who live life between the pages of Sonoma Magazine, our minimum-wage earners help make Sonoma the incredible place it is. Mr. Barnett’s proposal to increase their wage to a modest $15 per hour deserves support.
Bob Edwards
Sonoma
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