Yesterday, Alameda County workers and organizers gathered to celebrate getting one step closer to a future where minimum wage workers earn $30 an hour.
Content warning: this story contains a mention of suicide.
"What's up, what's up, what's up!?" Phil Byers said as he hyped up the crowd. "One fair wage!"
Byers is a member of the Black Organizing Project, one of the groups in the Alameda County Living Wage for All Coalition, which organized Tuesday's celebration.
The celebration was at BlackBerry Bistro on Park Avenue in Oakland. The East African restaurant was serving up spicy red lentils, fresh fruit and other treats to a packed crowd.
The event was organized by the Alameda County Living Wage for All Coalition. The group spent months gathering more than 50,000 signatures to put a minimum wage increase on the November ballot, and submitted them to the county last week.
The measure would allow voters to decide whether or not to raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour over the next decade.
If it passes, it will be the highest minimum wage in the United States.
However, the proposed ballot measure would only apply to unincorporated parts of the county. That means cities with their own municipal governments — like Oakland and Berkeley — would not be affected.
Tonisha Scott is a manager at One Fair Wage. She feels low wages are responsible for the county’s crisis of homelessness and have had a drastic impact on the people around her.
"I've had multiple friends commit suicide just from stress," Scott said. "Not making enough money is, um, it's stressful on anybody. Um, working multiple jobs where you're not getting enough sleep because you're going from one job directly to the next."
Scott is from Oakland — the city with the lowest minimum wage in Alameda County at $17.34 an hour.
She has spent the bulk of her career in the restaurant industry, at times making $14 an hour as a dishwasher. But when she started making $30 an hour working at One Fair Wage…
"I had never seen that kind of money before weekly," Scott reflected. "So I was able to catch up on bills. I was able to help my mom out, you know, some of my struggling friends because I had extra money for a change.
Nigel Jones is the owner of Oakland's Calabash Restaurant. He acknowledges that raising the minimum wage will be challenging for business owners, especially people of color.
"But at the same time, you need to ensure that you have staff members that can survive and support your business, because if not, you're gonna have turnover after turnover," Jones said to the crowd at the restaurant.
Sonia Arana is a worker who joined this fight after experiencing wage theft in Oakland.
"The owner actually kept telling me like, 'Oh, next week,' or, 'I'll pay you some other time,' but that check actually never came," Arana said thorough a translator. "I wasn't able to pay rent, I wasn't able to buy groceries. I have a daughter, so it was really hard for me to just make ends meet."
The wage hike initiative includes a provision that would allow workers like Sonia to recover triple the amount in lost wages.
Overall, the measure would require corporations with more than 100 employees and more than $1 billion of revenue to raise their hourly minimum wage to $30 by 2030, with annual increases of at least 3%.
Businesses employing between 25 and 100 people would have until 2035 to raise their minimum wage to the same level, while those with fewer than 25 employees would have until 2037.
The signatures gathered still have to be validated by the Alameda County Registrar of Voters' Office. Organizers are also working to put a similar initiative on an Oakland ballot.
