Hundreds of vendors and contractors that do business with Los Angeles County will have to pay more in wages as early as next month after the Board of Supervisors approved a hike in the county’s living wage last week.
The wage, as of Jan. 1, will rise to $9.64 per hour from $8.32 per hour for employees given health benefits. The wage increases to $11.84 per hour from $9.46 per hour for those without them. It will apply to all new contracts and existing contracts when they are renewed.
However, unlike the recent furious battle over the decision by the City of Los Angeles to expand its living wage to LAX-area hotels not doing direct business with the city, the county move has been greeted with relative acceptance by businesses.
“We were expecting the living wage to go up, since all the other mandated wages also are going up,” said Hilda Perez, office manager for Los Angeles-based Alltech Protective Services, which provides armed and unarmed security guard services to the county.
Other mandated wages include the state’s minimum wage, which will increase in two steps to $8 an hour from the current $6.75 an hour, and the city of L.A.’s living wage ordinance, which is indexed to inflation. The living wage in the city is $9.39 an hour for employees with benefits, $10.64 an hour for employees without benefits.
There’s good reason area businesses are not up in arms over the county board’s move: many contractors usually can factor the higher wages into their bid price, unlike the 12 LAX hotels targeted by the city that will have to figure out whether to raise room rates and banquet fees to absorb the higher wage costs. (Those hotels are now gathering signatures to put a referendum on the ballot challenging the extension of the ordinance.)
Also, the county’s living wage law only covers some firms doing business with the county and employing a total of 6,500 contract employees.
L.A. County Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina pushed for the county living wage increase, because the county wage is not indexed to inflation and has not been increased since it was instituted in 1999.
Sexual Harassment Training
While the state can make some things easier for employers, it can also make things much more complicated.
That’s precisely what’s happened with the latest interpretation of the state’s statute for sexual harassment training of supervisors. The law explicitly stated that employers with 50 or more employees in California had to provide at least two hours of sexual harassment training every two years for all supervisors within the state. Left unanswered was whether companies that have more than 50 employees nationwide but fewer than 50 in California were covered by the law.
Now, the California Office of Administrative Law has come out with a new set of proposed regulations that say companies that have at least 50 employees in total but fewer than 50 in California are covered. Those regulations are expected to be adopted by next February.
According to labor law attorneys Wendy Lazerson and Bryan Daley with Bingham McCutchen LLP, “If company X has only one supervisor and five employees working in California, but employs a total of 50 employees, 44 of whom work in another state or country, the employer must provide sexual harassment training to its lone California supervisor.”
On a related note, since the law has been in effect for nearly two years, employers must make provisions to retrain supervisors next year who underwent the training back in 2005.
Workers’ Comp Change
It’s rare when a new regulation is aimed at helping employers recoup costs, but that’s exactly what the state has done for companies that have had to make changes in their workplaces to accommodate the needs of injured workers.
Under return to work regulations passed by the state Division of Workers’ Compensation in September, employers with 50 or fewer workers who have made modifications to their workplace to help injured workers return to work can be reimbursed up to $2,500 per injured worker. This applies retroactively to all employers who have had injured workers return to work since Jan. 1, 2004.
The regulations are the result of reforms passed earlier in the decade aimed at getting injured workers to return to work more quickly.
To file a claim for reimbursement, employers must use a form developed by the Division of Workers’ Compensation. The form can be accessed on the agency’s website: dir.ca.gov/dwc. Click on the alphabetical listings in the Forms section on the left hand side and then scroll down until “Return to Work Forms” appears.
Staff reporter Howard Fine can be reached by phone at (323) 549-5225, ext. 227, or by e-mail at
[email protected]
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