Supervisors advance changes to city's Minimum Compensation Ordinance, divide anti-retaliation section for later hearing

Supervisor Tom Ammiano introduced an amended version of the city's Minimum Compensation Ordinance (MCO) at the Finance Committee meeting on Aug. 8, proposing CPI indexing to prevent erosion of wages and several technical clarifications. "Each nonprofit worker has lost over $17,000," Ammiano said, arguing indexing will help low-wage contractors keep pace with inflation.

Why it matters: The MCO governs pay floors for workers on city service contracts and airport leases. Ammiano's changes would set a baseline wage of $10.77 for covered contracts and require annual CPI adjustments beginning Jan. 1, 2008, while giving the mayor limited authority to suspend increases if a joint report projects a general fund shortfall above a threshold.

The City Attorney's Office briefed the committee on technical edits and the controversial anti-retaliation clause. A City Attorney representative described the anti-retaliation provision as creating "a rebuttable presumption" that specified adverse employer actions taken within 90 days of an employee's exercise of MCO rights are retaliatory; committee members agreed to divide that section into a separate file for further hearing so the panel could act on other parts of the ordinance sooner.

Budget and implementation questions dominated the committee exchange. Supervisor Ammiano told members his office found that funding both an October and January CPI increase would raise FY2007-08 costs by about $2.6 million above earlier assumptions, prompting him to remove the October step and keep the Jan. 1 increase. Noni Coloretti, the Mayor's Budget Director, said the administration has administratively applied higher rates in past years and believed it could find roughly $300,000 to cover a remaining funding gap, but asked for time to re-estimate costs under the revised language. Controller Ed Harrington said current estimates remain in the roughly $1.3 million range and noted that adding an enforcement position at the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLS) would require a supplemental appropriation.

Enforcement capacity: Donna Levitt of OLS said the office currently has one staffer responsible for citywide monitoring and enforcement of MCO and related ordinances and that an additional enforcement staff position would be needed to perform compliance reviews of nonprofit contractors.

Public comment was broadly supportive of paid-indexing but raised funding concerns for nonprofits and child-care providers. Connie Ford of the San Francisco Labor Council thanked supervisors for the amendments, saying, "This will make a difference in people's lives." Child-care advocates including Donna Cahill and Debbie Lerman pressed the committee to ensure the Wages Plus program or other funding be included so centers can meet higher payroll costs.

What the committee did: Supervisor Ammiano moved to amend the file and to "divide the file" to send the anti-retaliation provision to a separate hearing; he also offered a technical amendment lowering the fiscal trigger from 2% to 1% (accepted "without objection"). The committee agreed to move the amended legislation forward so the full Board can consider it, while the divided anti-retaliation section will return for later committee review.

Next steps: The amended ordinance and the divided anti-retaliation file will proceed through the Board process; the Mayor's Office and controller will provide revised cost estimates and the committee flagged the need to budget a limited-duration enforcement analyst if the OLS role is expanded.