CLEVELAND, Ohio – As 2018 nears its close, Cleveland is approaching Mayor Frank Jackson’s goal of raising the minimum hourly wage to $15 for all city employees.
The Jackson administration and 21 of the 30 labor unions representing city workers have agreed to contracts that provide for a minimum of $15 an hour.
The contracts cover the largest labor units, including those representing police patrol officers and firefighters. They also include many smaller units, such theatrical stage workers and ticket takers.
In its Dec. 3 meeting, the last of the year, City Council approved an agreement with employees who service and maintain equipment. That group includes auto-body workers and mechanics.
As part of a re-election campaign pledge in 2017, Jackson immediately set a $15 hourly minimum for non-union employees.
What happens next?
Going into 2019, nine contracts are left to be settled, all involving smaller groups of employees, according to Dan Willams, a spokesman for the Jackson administration.
Among those employees are emergency medical technicians and paramedics, civilian workers in the police department such as like bi-lingual translators, various laborers, maintenance workers, gardeners and waste collectors.
The goal is to have all the contracts settled before March, Williams said.
What prompted the decision?
When he announced his plan in 2017, Jackson touted a $15 minimum hourly wage as an effort to help lower-wage workers better make ends meet.
"There's been more and more tax relief on the affluent and more and more tax burdens on the poor, particularly the working poor," Jackson said at the time. "When you don't have a lot of money ... just a few dollars can make a big difference."
Jackson’s plan was to offer the $15 minimum to lower-pay classifications in exchange for commitment by the unions to accept three-year contracts with to no raise in the first year and 2 percent raises in each of the subsequent years.
Among the city workforce of more than 7,000 employees, about 500 will be affected by the policy change.
What about a citywide minimum wage?
Jackson’s announcement raised some eyebrows because he had opposed a hotly debated proposal by Raise Up Cleveland and the Service Employees International Union to establish a $15 minimum wage for both public and private employers citywide.
The mayor and City Council President Kevin Kelley argued that requiring employers across the city to all pay $15 an hour, when the same laws would not apply outside of Cleveland, would hurt the city economically.
Jackson has supported raising the minimum wage statewide, though.
And while he remained steadfast that his plan for city workers wasn't inspired by the Raise Up Cleveland effort, he acknowledged that his $15-an- hour wage figure came from that movement.
“This is our attempt to be in line with what we believe in,” Jackson said then.