Come the new year, employees in Sunnyvale making the minimum wage will be getting a boost.
Following in the footsteps of San Jose and Mountain View, the Sunnyvale City Council voted Oct. 14 to introduce an ordinance that requires Sunnyvale employers to pay a minimum wage of $10.30 per hour starting Jan. 1.
The Sunnyvale ordinance will adjust automatically each year based on any increase in the consumer price index. The final vote was 6-1, with Councilman Dave Whittum dissenting.
The council also voted to include a resolution to work with the city of Mountain View on a regional $15 an hour minimum wage by 2018.
“We have had a long history of collaborating with San Jose,” Mayor Jim Griffith said during the meeting. “Mountain View has also been a very good partner and is taking this issue seriously; so will we.”
Sunnyvale’s ordinance was modeled after the city of San Jose’s. In San Jose, the current minimum wage is $10.15 per hour and will increase on Jan. 1, based on this year’s increase in the CPI.
Mountain View voted earlier this month to establish a $10.30 wage that will also begin in the new year, with a goal to increase the minimum wage even more in upcoming years.
Currently, Sunnyvale employers are governed by the state’s minimum wage requirement, which is $9 per hour and is set to increase to $10 per hour on Jan. 1, 2016.
The move to one-up the state was primarily driven by the high cost of living in the area, where a family of two bringing in $47,700 a year qualifies for emergency services with local nonprofits.
Organizations such as Our Daily Bread, St. Vincent de Paul and Sunnyvale Community Services, which provide such emergency services, all spoke in favor of the ordinance.
“Minimum wage workers can’t afford to live here,” SCS executive director Marie Bernard told council members during the meeting. “Those who do are doubling and tripling up. They’re living in garages. And sadly, they’re living in cars.”
Sunnyvale will contract with the city of San Jose for enforcement of the ordinance, which will be complaint-driven. Sunnyvale staff reported that contracting with San Jose will be more cost-effective than providing these services in house.
While some representatives of the business sector pushed for tipped workers to be exempt, Sunnyvale’s ordinance–to stay consistent with the other ordinances–will not have any exemptions for specific groups of employees.
“The one thing that’s important is the minimum wage in all these cities should try to be uniform, because otherwise it will cause confusion among customers and business owners,” county assessor and former Sunnyvale mayor Larry Stone said during the meeting.
