Just moments after the Burlington City Council voted on a new redistricting plan last night, its members dove headfirst into an even thornier issue: the city’s livable wage ordinance.
For the last several months, the council’s three-member ordinance committee has been consulting with employers, city agencies, nonprofit organizations and the public to hammer out a set of amendments to a city law originally passed in 2001, ordinance committee chair Chip Mason (D-Ward 5) explained last night.
As envisioned, the ordinance was meant to guarantee a livable wage to employees of the city or any company with which it contracts. Right now, Burlington defines “livable” as $13.94 an hour for companies that offer health insurance and $15.83 for those that don’t.
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By setting a standard that the City itself won’t adhere to, the only thing this ordinance accomplishes is to force businesses to go begging to City Hall for favors and special treatment. They should call it the Cronyism Act of 2013.
Small typo in this report. The seasonal worker debate was over a definition of years of service/employment with the city, not years lived in the city of Burlington.
Frankly, the two amendments are a sorry statement towards the rhetoric by some city leaders that there is a commitment by the city to pay livable wages in Burlington. There is a net loss of employees who would benefit from livable wage by taking out the leased airport property provision even though a few seasonal workers will now be guaranteed a livable wage. Think of all those airline counter employees, baggage handlers, rental car employees, etc. While not all of those leased space employers were following the law before these amendments, they should have been doing so and now the city has given them a formal pass. In the long run, less workers will now benefit from this progressive and worker-friendly policy, not more. This is a real shame.