Now at a 40-year low, California's minimum wage hasn't increased for eight years, while efforts to raise it through the legislature have been stymied by Republican control. That could change if backers succeed in getting the Living Wage Initiative on the ballot for November, for the first time offering poor and working families something to vote for rather than against. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigration and labor trends. For photographs illustrating this article please call Pacific News Service. Bacon's e-mail address is <dbacon@igc.apc.org>.

SAN FRANCISCO -- First came the taxpayers' revolt, bringing conservative, middle-class suburbanites to the polls. Then came the backlash against immigrants and the drive to abolish affirmative action. But now a coalition of labor and community organizations hopes to give the working poor their turn at California's initiative process with a "Living Wage Initiative" aimed at the November ballot.

If the initiative qualifies, and voters approve it, California's minimum wage would rise to $5.00 an hour in 1997, and then to $5.75 an hour -- the first such increase in eight years.

Santos Guerrero typifies the constituents the initiative aims to help. For two years she sewed shirts, dresses and other clothes at the Grand D sewing factory here, earning $4.25 an hour -- the minimum wage. Meanwhile, as the cost of living has increased by 25 percent over the last decade, Guerrero has seen her earnings (typically $260 for two 40-hour weeks) shrink.

"I was in Macy's once with a friend from work and we saw a nightgown we had sewn in the shop selling for $300. We couldn't believe it," Guerrero recalls.

Opponents of the drive argue that people earning minimum wage are mostly teenagers and people with no family to support. But organizers counter that 80 percent of the workers who would be covered by the Living Wage Initiative are adults. Working women are more likely to be low wage earners, and many, like Guerrero, are heads of households.

With the issue of the incomes of working families injected into the election, initiative organizers hope they will turn out voters like Guerrero in record numbers come November, possibly altering the balance of power in the California state house, if not wiping out the razor-thin Republican majority in Congress.

"Poor people and working families often don't see a lot to vote for," says Frank Martin del Campo, a representative for Service Employees Local 790 in Oakland, and a longtime activist in the Bay Area's Latino community. The Republican Party stepped into the void by putting initiatives on the ballot, like (the anti-immigrant) Proposition 187. Now another Republican-backed initiative, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) against affirmative action, is gathering signatures to secure a place on the November ballot. The Living Wage Initiative could counter this shift to the right, del Campo predicts.

Even if it passes, however, it won't restore the minimum wage to the value of its purchasing power in the late 1970s. Now at a 40-year low, it would have to go up to $6.05 an hour just to meet the poverty line established by the Federal government for a family of three. "You can legitimately ask if $5.00 or even $5.75 is enough of an increase," notes Rose Fua of Equal Rights Advocates, one of the initiative sponsors. "but we have to start somewhere. If we can win this increase, it improves our chances to push it up further."

Employers have long argued that if the minimum wage goes up, so will unemployment as jobs flee the state. But studies conducted on job growth after the minimum wage increase of 1988 showed that the number of low-wage jobs actually increased, according to Richard Holober of the California Labor Federation. Where job flight occurred, it affected those at higher wages. When New Jersey raised its minimum wage, the number of jobs similarly increased.

For Fua, the importance of the initiative lies first in its effect on minimum wage workers themselves. "We have to understand the human cost of low wages -- the way they trap people in poverty, forcing them to choose every day between food or rent, between clothes or a visit to the doctor."

Ironically, when Republican governor Hiram Johnson signed the first minimum wage bill into law in the early part of the century, its purpose was to free people from poverty, not trap them in it. That purpose, initiative backers argue, was subsequently subverted by the state's Republican-appointed Industrial Welfare Commissioners which has recommended only one increase in the minimum wage in the last 14 years. Since that hike, in 1988, the commission has held only one set of hearings to review the need for another increase. Despite union protests, the hearings bypassed Los Angeles, the city with the country's highest concentration of minimum wage workers.

Given the Republican-dominated legislature and governor's mansion, "There's no way to raise the minimum wage by passing a bill through the legislature," says California Labor Federation executive secretary-treasurer Jack Nenning. "If the people of California want the minimum wage to go up, they must act themselves."