The Los Angeles City Council has endorsed on Tuesday a hike in the minimum salary of the country's second-largest city from the existing $9 to $15 an hour by 2020, adding to a string of successes for community and labor groups that have campaigned for similar wage increases in numerous U.S. cities.
With the lopsided 14-1 vote on the measure, the city council has instructed City Attorney Mike Feuer to create an ordinance that would execute the salary increases, setting the platform for a final vote in June. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who last year proposed a pay increase that would have brought the minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, said in a statement that he will sign the salary hike into law, permitting the first salary boost - to $10.50 for each hour - to be implemented in July 2016.
This measure would oblige companies with more than 25 workers to meet the $15 pay level by 2020, while small-scale businesses would have an additional year to conform.
The proposed plan with prearranged endorsement in Los Angeles, where housing payments are among the most expensive in the nation, embodies an influential victory for union groups supporting higher pay for low-wage workers.
With the federal minimum salary stationary at $7.25 per hour ever since 2009, religious and labor groups have gradually pushed local governments in liberal-leaning regions to legislate their own minimum wage increases even as their hopes dim for a salary hike from the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress.
The local government would be implementing the 67-percent pay increase progressively, beginning at $10.50 per hour for larger employers in 2016, and gradually rising each year until it reaches its target $15 per hour in 2020.
Businesses and nonprofits with 25 or fewer employees would conform to a marginally deliberate stepped-up hike in minimum salary pay.
Lawmakers stated the proposal, which approaches the lists of corresponding minimum salary increases in other major municipalities including San Francisco and Seattle, would boost pay of a projected 800,000 employees in the city.
Other municipalities have also progressed to increase their minimum salaries in phases.
Chicago city officials approved in 2014 increasing its minimum salary to $13 by 2019, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has pushed for hiking the minimum salary in his city to about $15 by 2019.
Seattle is phasing in a pay increase that would put the minimum wage to $15 per hour over the next two to six years, subjected to the size of the business. San Francisco voters have permitted increasing their minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2018.
The San Francisco Bay Area city of Emeryville has given preliminary approval to gradually boost its minimum salary to $16 per hour by 2019, in what would be the country's highest such minimum pay. The city council would be voting on Tuesday evening on whether to provide that final approval.
