In Brief:
State preemption of local authority has accelerated, touching on everything from firearms and public health to housing and police reform. Local governments have increased their efforts in support of workers' rights in recent years, and are running up against both established and newly created preemptive barriers.
Bills enacted in Texas and Florida have denied cities the right to enact workplace heat safety ordinances, for example. A new report from the NYU Wagner Labor Initiative and progressive advocacy organization Local Progress looks at strategies that can help localities work around such restrictions.
Local leaders have advocated for a $15 federal minimum wage for more than a decade, says LuJia Gong, policy and legal director for Local Progress. That's yet to occur, and only seven states have managed it.
No matter what happens at the state level, local leaders have their own power, says Terri Gerstein, co-author of the report and director of the Wagner Labor Initiative. “There are ways that localities can fight back, and they have been fighting back in many states.”
Gerstein and Lujia Gong, co-author and policy and legal director at Local Progress, agree that the first step is to have someone in a jurisdiction whose job it is to pay attention to the needs of local workers — even if only part-time — and take stock of the things government can do to benefit them. It’s not a given that there will be such a person.
Over the last decade or so, a handful of local governments have gone further and established offices to do this work. It's a new phenomenon that expands support for workers and employers in ways that go well beyond wage standards.
Procurement Power
Jodi Sugerman-Brozan leads a new worker protection office in the cabinet of Boston mayor Michele Wu. “We don’t have a ton of power because of preemption,” she says. “Our power is focused on our contracting and procurement processes.”
Service providers that contract with the city must commit to an hourly wage of $18.20 for their lowest-paid employees. Companies hired to do construction work for Boston have to agree that 51 percent of the workers they hire will be Boston residents, 40 percent people of color and 12 percent women. A history of wage theft is a factor in considering licenses for restaurants.
One of the reasons the new office was created was that the city had experienced an increase in fatalities in the construction industry. Federal regulations limited how much the city could prescribe, so the city passed an ordinance requiring anyone requesting a permit for a construction or demolition project to provide a site safety plan. It also provided free OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) training to contractors.
The search for ways to drive best practices is ongoing. The labor compliance office can’t fine contractors who don’t meet hiring guidelines, for example, or deny a permit to a contractor with wage theft violations. “We don’t have free rein to do anything we want, no municipality does,” Sugerman-Broznan says. “It requires that we think about where we have windows, and how we can use them.”
(Erika Schultz/TNS)
A Message to the Community
Labor standards have traditionally been seen as state-level matters, but conditions are not uniform across local jurisdictions, says Steven Marchese, director of the Seattle's labor standards office. The city's wage policies are a case in point.Seattle was the first big city to mandate a $15 minimum wage. This was a nonpartisan response to the fact that it had grown 25 percent due to the proliferation of tech companies, Marchese says. The cost of living rose beyond the means of average wage earners, and they were the ones who convinced policy makers an increase was necessary.
The existence of an office that enforces labor ordinances gives a local government the ability to look beyond wages to things that state policies might not address, such as paid leave, scheduling, and protections for domestic workers and independent contractors. Every time an investigation is completed or a settlement is announced, it builds trust in local government, says Marchese.
State government doesn’t generally push back against Seattle’s efforts, but Marchese did have a recent experience of preemption. The city created its own minimum pay standard for Uber and Lyft drivers.
Resistance from app-based transportation companies forced the issue into the legislature, which created a statewide standard that preempted what Seattle had done. Though it fell somewhat short of its goal, local activism led to better pay for workers in cities throughout the state, Marchese says.
Staying Close
Branden Butler's position as director of San Diego County’s labor standards office was created in response to demand from the community, according to Butler. State government can’t match this connection to local workers and employers, he says.
The county has taken up a responsibility that the state doesn't have resources to meet. It established a Workplace Justice Fund to help workers waiting for unpaid wages even after legal judgements by the state. The fund, the first of its kind in the nation, provides up to $3,000 to cover living expenses. The judgement is assigned to the county and it seeks to collect.
San Diego County’s $2 billion in contracts give it additional powers to prevent wage theft. A unpaid settlement can be withheld as a term for a new contract. Janitorial, security and landscaping contracts, involving workers who are most likely to be shorted, hold back a percentage for a wage theft retention fund.
In addition to these kinds of protections, contracts for city-funded work can stipulate provisions that work around state preemptions. They are especially powerful tools at this time, says Gong.
Unprecedented levels of federal funding are coming to local governments, and they have leeway in mandating contractor standards. “There’s a really rich opportunity to ensure that government dollars are going toward good quality jobs in a community,” she says.
