Why the $28 minimum wage for California construction workers died

from Ben ChristopherCalMatters

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A proposal that would set the first of its kind minimum wage for some California housing workers, is dead for the year in the face of fierce opposition from a large coalition of construction unions.

Assembly Bill 1751 will speed up the approval of new townhouses. In exchange for using the law, developers will have to pay their workers at least $28 an hour.

In a hearing before the state Senate’s housing committee, Oakland Democrat Buffy Weeks, a co-sponsor of the bill, reluctantly agreed to eliminate the minimum wage “based on strong opposition to this change by the Building Tradesmen.”

Sen. Jesse Arreguin, the committee chairman, ultimately made the elimination of the wage measure a condition of his approval. The Berkeley Democrat vowed to pursue a policy that would “establish some sort of minimum threshold” in the coming months that would be acceptable to all parties, including the State Building and Construction Board.

The council, known colloquially in Sacramento as “the trades,” is a union coalition made up of electricians, plumbers, metal workers and other skilled trades. She has been rallying against the measure since it was introduced in April, arguing that it would undermine federally determined “prevailing wage” rates. — even higher minimum wage levels required for publicly funded projects.

Carpenters unions in the state, a regular political foe of the trades on housing policy, disputed that characterization, arguing that housing workers rarely work in jobs where pay is determined by federal public works rules. The bill is sponsored by the New California Coalition, a centrist political advocacy group made up mostly of business groups.

After the wage provision was withdrawn, the trades – whose members showed up at the hearing in droves – became neutral on the bill.

The bill eventually passed the Senate Housing Committee, but not before a number of Democrats expressed frustration with the removal of the wage language.

“We have a segment of people who should be making more than the minimum wage,” said Sen. Lena Gonzalez, D-Long Beach.

Weeks ended her testimony on a similar note.

“The idea of ​​raising the threshold from $16 to $28 seems like it should be easy for us in this legislature as Democrats,” she said.

Even with the wage language dropped, trouble may lie ahead for AB 1751. Another Democrat on the committee, Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, noted that the changes made today did not address her concerns about the bill being circumvented by local land use authorities. Durazo chairs the Local Government Committee, where the bill will be headed next week.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.