Nonprofits Feel the Squeeze of Wage Increases - City of Berkeley mandated wage increases of course:
This July, the Berkeley City Council voted to increase the city’s living wage from $9.75 to $10.76 an hour to reflect inflation. This was the first increase since the living wage ordinance was enacted in August 2000.Stop, you're breaking my heart! Wait, I know - ask the taxpayers to pick up the tab.
But some nonprofits can’t afford to pay the increase. For example, the Berkeley Food and Housing Project, Berkeley’s largest homeless services organization, estimates it would cost some $30,000 to bring their employees’ salaries up to compliance—money the group doesn’t have. Other Berkeley nonprofits are also feeling the crunch.
“We aren’t like the business community. We don’t have any way to pass off the costs,” said Florence Green, executive director of the California Association of Nonprofits.
When businesses’ costs increase, they can raise prices or push to sell more, said Terrie Light, associate director of the Project. But for most nonprofits, the customers aren’t paying, and their government contracts and foundation grants rarely increase in pace with rising costs.
And to prove that no bad idea goes unemulated, San Francisco wants to get in on the action - San Francisco Voting on Minimum Wage:
Proposition L, one of 14 measures on the city ballot Tuesday, would impose an $8.50-per-hour minimum wage on all employers in the city, not just those awarded municipal contracts. The state's hourly minimum wage is $6.75, and the minimum required under federal law is $5.15.Unfortunately for these goofs some useful jobs just aren't worth $10 per hour. But there's another way out for a business - leaving town. Good advice for the citizens too.
The initiative's backers, who include advocates for the poor, labor unions and San Francisco's elected supervisors, maintain that a city-specific pay mandate is long overdue in a place where working parents need to earn about twice the proposed amount to meet basic expenses.
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If it passes as expected, San Francisco would be the first California city and only the third in the nation to set its own minimum wage. Washington, D.C., guarantees its workers $1 more than the federal minimum, which Congress last raised in 1997. Earlier this year in New Mexico, the Santa Fe City Council set a local minimum wage of $8.50 for all businesses with at least 25 employees.
San Francisco's measure is a little more ambitious because it doesn't exempt small businesses from the mandate. The new wage would take effect in three months for for-profit businesses, but would be phased in over two years for nonprofit organizations and firms with fewer than 10 employees.
City contractors already are required to pay their employees an hourly "living wage" of $9 for nonprofits and $10.25 for for-profit companies.
