It was trumpeted seven years ago as a breakthrough for organized labor a living wage ordinance that would require city contractors to pay their workers $8.78 an hour with health benefits or $10.03 an hour without. Some business leaders worried that the private sector would not be far behind.

Hardly. Last week’s release of a study showing that L.A.’s living wage ordinance has raised wages for only 10,000 workers points up how small a dent has been made.

Similar laws have been enacted in Los Angeles County and the cities of Pasadena, San Fernando, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. In each case, only a few thousand workers have been impacted, leaving most low-wage workers untouched.

“The number of people being covered by this is just a drop in the bucket,” said Dan Mitchell, professor of management and public policy at UCLA.

The study, which was conducted by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a living wage advocacy group, found that of the 22,000 employees covered by the law, 12,000 were already receiving wages above the wage thresholds.

Even living wage proponents agree that ordinances like the one in Los Angeles only go so far.

“Back when the L.A. living wage law was being debated, the business community argued that this was the camel’s nose in the tent, that pretty soon all businesses in the city and the county would have to pay their workers this living wage,” said Madeline Janis-Aparicio, executive director for LAANE. “But we said at the time that this was meant to be an incremental approach, and sure enough, that’s the way it’s turned out.”

Aparicio said that LAANE’s focus has turned more toward economic development projects, trying to make city approvals conditional on developers and tenants paying living wages and guaranteeing benefits to employees. Such deals have been struck on projects in Hollywood, the Staples Center and the proposed modernization of Los Angeles International Airport.

“Several thousand more jobs will be covered through these Community Redevelopment Agency projects and other community benefit agreements,” said Aparicio, who is on the board of the CRA.

LAANE and other community groups have also focused their attention on labor organizing efforts, as in the current battle to unionize downtown hotels. The group has also tried to stop the spread of big-box supercenters; last year it defeated a referendum from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to build a supercenter in Inglewood.

Outside L.A., the biggest living wage battleground has been Santa Monica, which passed one of the nation’s first ordinances requiring certain businesses in the city’s coastal zone to pay their workers a living wage, regardless of whether they received city contracts. The ordinance was aimed at beachfront hotels.

But the hotels and the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce fought back, putting the ordinance on the November 2002 ballot as a referendum. It was narrowly defeated, pretty much bringing to a halt any attempt to broaden living wage laws beyond companies receiving direct city contract dollars.

“We learned a simple lesson from that defeat: not to be on the ‘yes’ side of a ballot measure,” Aparicio said. “We re-evaluated our tactics and that’s when we decided to learn how to use the political process and the land-use process more effectively.”

Another factor behind the slow spread of living wage laws has been caution within cities.

“Every city worries about the cutthroat competition for private investment and many are reluctant to pass laws they think will make them less competitive,” said Peter Dreier, professor of political science and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College. Dreier, a proponent of “economic justice,” said the study should put those fears to rest, at least with regard to living wage laws.

But Dreier said the living wage laws are no panacea for the working poor. He noted that Los Angeles has more people who earn wages below the federal poverty threshold than any other major metropolitan area in the nation. A huge influx of immigrants and an exodus of manufacturing jobs the chief culprits.

Aparicio said that the incremental approach to combat low-wages through living wage laws, unionizing and other tactics can be frustratingly slow. “It makes us feel like Sisyphus, except that instead of the stone rolling back down the hill, the hill just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” she said.