It’s easy to see why the report on Burlington’s livable wage ordinance — ordered by the mayor last November — was issued at 2 p.m. last Friday. Politicians know that’s the best time to release embarrassing information and thus bury a damaging news story.
Sure enough, the 55-page report shows the ordinance has gone almost entirely unenforced during the nearly 12 years it’s been on the city’s books. Of 160 municipal contracts subject to livable-wage provisions, just 23 — or 14 percent — were found to be in full compliance with the ordinance. And 19 of the 23 conforming contracts came into compliance only after the city began its review early this year.
Mayor Miro Weinberger ordered the review after the city’s Board of Finance issued a controversial exemption from the wage rules to the Skinny Pancake restaurant for cafes it’s operating at Burlington International Airport. Skinny Pancake owner Benjamin Adler persuaded city officials that paying his workers according to Burlington’s livable wage would significantly increase prices for airport customers.
“No restaurant pays their dishwasher $17.71 an hour,” Adler told Seven Days in November. “It’s not sustainable.” The Skinny Pancake is in full compliance with the ordinance because it received the exemption.
Failure to pay a livable wage is defined in the ordinance as a civil offense subject to fines up to $500 for each day a violator remains out of compliance. But the city has not penalized any contractor in response to this flagrant flouting of its rules. It’s unlikely the city was even aware that contractors were out of compliance in most cases or that department heads weren’t enforcing the ordinance. “For most of the city, there is no mechanism or personnel to actually do the monitoring contemplated by the ordinance,” says the report prepared by the office of City Attorney Eileen Blackwood.
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I’m confused as to why the livable wage rate wasn’t known by city employees. Isn’t it required to be posted in each office? It’s definitely posted in CEDO right in the main area near the copier and the mailboxes.
The public good may be one reason that the City of Burlington feels it must own and operate it’s own airport but I’m pretty certain that the real drivers for this are to provide high paying jobs for political hacks and lucrative monopolies for friends of City Hall.
Construction Contractors have been forced to comply with the City’s Livable Wage for years and it has always been enforced (The women in Construction ordinance as well), and it most certainly DOES add a big premium to the cost that taxpayers are paying.