As of September 1, 2011, ALL 1,875 retail establishments are prohibited from providing light-weight, single-use plastic carryout bags to customers at the point of sale. MORE

By Jason Islas
Lookout Staff

November 3, 2011 -- The Santa Monica City Council approved a motion Tuesday night to explore how to better channel City contracts to businesses that provide fair wages and safe working conditions for their employees.

The motion, approved by a 5 to 1 vote, comes one week after the city's Bonus Car Wash became the nation's first car wash establishment to sign a union contract with workers.

At the contract-signing ceremony last Tuesday, Council member Kevin McKeown promised that he and Council member Terry O'Day would do everything in their power to send the City's fleet of vehicles to Bonus.

The City has "a rule that we only contract with companies that pay a living wage,” McKeown said at Tuesday's council meeting. “But there are industries where nobody makes the living wage,” like car washes, he added.

O' Day touted the contract, which also contains grievance and arbitration procedures, saying it makes the City's enforcement work less complicated.

“The employment contract becomes a private way to enforce the law, which takes much of the responsibility off the public sector for enforcing these laws and reduces overall our cost burden,” O'Day said.

But Council member Bobby Shriver, who cast the lone dissenting vote, pointed out that the minimum wage is already guaranteed by state law and that City contracts already require businesses to abide by all state and federal laws.

It isn't a question of “fair wages,” but of whether or not businesses are abiding by state law, said Shriver, who opposed the motion because it was too vague and filled with undefined terms, such as “fair wage” and “dignified working conditions.”

Shriver, who is an attorney, argued that the motion should be limited to the “enforcement of law.”

“If we start getting into what's fair and a living wage, that's a different issue,” Shriver said, adding that he didn't think it was an extra administrative burden to assure state laws are enforced.

City Manager Rod Gould also cautioned against adding a layer of regulations to a process many businesses already consider burdensome.

“Currently it is difficult enough to do business with the city because our requirements are much greater than most private businesses," Gould said.

In addition, Gould said, it would be more costly “if we have to add requiring the labor contracts or wage contracts to all bidders for city business and examine them to determine whether fair wages are being paid.”

Although the contract signed by workers at Bonus Car Wash does not provide a “living wage,” it does guarantee that workers earn 2 percent above the minimum wage, or $8.16 an hour, Chloe Osmer Acting Director of the Carwash Campaign for CLEAN (Community Labor Environmental Action Network) told the council. Workers in the industry sometimes receive only $35 to $45 for a 10-hour day, she said.

Mayor Richard Bloom was absent.