Will Supes buy into $13 living wage?

Tuesday is the busiest day for Anita Torres.

A home-care provider with Sonoma County, she gets to her first house at 10 a.m. “This house is the easier of the two,” she says. “I go over, make sure she’s awake, help her shower, make her bed, get her changed and make her breakfast.” From there, Torres makes sure her patient is in good health and takes her grocery shopping. Before she leaves, Torres wants to know her patient has everything she needs before she eats a sack lunch and drives to her next patient.

“The next lady is more of a challenge because she’s very weak and can’t walk very far,” she says. “Whenever I take her I also have to bring her wheelchair because some places won’t have an electric scooter she can ride in.” After repeating the process with her second patient, Torres comes home at 7 p.m., preparing her next day’s visits.

Currently, Torres is responsible for four senior women in Sonoma, Napa and Santa Rosa. In addition to cooking, cleaning, driving and household maintenance, Torres knows basic first-aid and other medical skills involving seniors, including medication schedules, colonoscopy bag cleaning and catheter insertion. She works five days a week and earns $11.65 an hour.

Torres can barely make ends meet. She lives in a house with her significant other and two members of his family, who all pitch in for living expenses.

Torres is on MediCal, which offers another unique twist in the reliability of her finances. If one of her patients goes to the hospital and renders her service unneeded for a period of time, she could fail to meet the minimum weekly working-hour threshold for the benefit, and lose her place in MediCal line.

But Torres isn’t the only one having a hard time living comfortably with her wages. Due to high turnover rates, Sonoma County employs between 3,800 and 4,500 home healthcare workers at any given time. Last year, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors hired an analyst to predict the financial impact of implementing a living wage ordinance. The report, prepared by Oakland-based Blue Sky Consultant, noted a living wage increase to $13 and hour would be within the board’s budget, but the report excluded home healthcare workers, nonprofits who receive county funding and County Fair employees, significantly reducing the amount of qualified county workers from the living wage.

In response, Marty Bennett from the North Bay Jobs for Justice coalition, along with a conglomeration of other organizations and foundations, ordered a separate analysis of a possible Sonoma County living wage, conducted by the University of Massachusetts. That report not only recommended a living wage of $15 an hour and included the jobs left out of the Blue Sky report, but also recommended tying the living wage to San Francisco’s Consumer Price Index to account for inflation and reported the additional price for inclusion would cost the county approximately $10.6 million. The county’s general fund for the fiscal year of 2014-2015 is $390 million. The county budget for that year is $1.4 billion. The cost increase for including these workers would be 0.8 percent of the total budget, or 2.7 percent of the general fund, according to North Bay Jobs for Justice.

A living wage differs from a minimum wage through an interpretation of the cost of living in a given area. The UMass report, written by Dr. Jeannette Wicks-Lim, reported that the current $9 an hour state minimum wage leaves a worker with annual earnings of just under $20,000 – far below the $66,800 it’s estimated to cost a family of three in California to pay for food, shelter, childcare, transportation, health care, other necessities and taxes.

A living wage of $15 an hour would at least get a family with two full-time county workers to within a few thousand dollars of that estimated cost.

Living wage ordinances are already in effect in several cities, including Sonoma, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Marin, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara and Ventura, but most cities don’t include home healthcare workers.

The Board of Supervisors will meet June 9 to go over both proposals and open the floor for public comment. The board will not vote on the issue at that time.

First District Supervisor Susan Gorin, representing the Sonoma Valley, says the board recognizes the need to increase the wages of county workers.

“I have Marty Bennett’s number on speed dial,” says Gorin.

“He is persistent and thorough in his research,” she says. “We hope to work together to draft a living wage plan that benefits the maximum number of workers within our budget.” Gorin said that although tying the living wage to the Consumer Price Index would help accurately match inflation, county revenue does not follow CPI and tying wages to the cost of inflation would not be fiscally prudent when the county could adjust wages year to year as needs arise.

Gorin added that the inclusion of nonprofits in a living wage would cause a pay imbalance between employees within the same nonprofit – those working with the county and those that do not.

“For example,” says Gorin, “if three employees in that nonprofit worked with us and we raised their wages, the manager of that nonprofit would have to take whatever revenue they make and allocate that to compensating their other employees, which they can barely afford to keep now.”

Bennett counters by saying some nonprofits already pay above the $15 an hour in either wages or benefits.

“And for those nonprofits that can’t afford to raise the pay for all their employees, (they) can petition additional funds from the county to compensate,” says Bennett. “We know that’s an issue, but it’s not a deal-breaker for the living wage.”

Bennett said the issue now is finding the money.

“Right now, we’ve talked to the supervisors and some of them are willing to propose a moratorium on hiring management,” he says. “In addition, most counties want a general fund reserve of 10 percent of their fund. Our county is resting at 9 to 10 percent, and wants to plan for a 15 percent reserve by sending $5 million annually within the next five years. We think if they stretch their goal to 10 years, or if they settle on a 12, 13 or 14 percent reserve, they can find the money to install a living wage for everyone.”

For Torres, any pay increase would be welcome in her home.

“I’m tired of deciding which bills to pay over another,” she says. “I just want to get the medicine I need and the groceries this family needs. We want to live without the fear we’ll never make ends meet.”