Despite delays and confusion surrounding a new minimum wage law for California’s lowest-paid health workers, some employers have begun raising pay ahead of the state’s deadline.
Health care workers at San Bernardino County clinics will get a raise this month even though Newsom and lawmakers delayed the mandated wage increase until at least October. So will workers at University of California health systems, which announced in May that it would comply with the law on its original timeline.
Chas Kelley, a clinical nursing assistant at a clinic operated by San Bernardino County, will see his new wage hike reflected in his next paycheck. His pay is increasing almost $2 to about $23 an hour.
The county didn’t have to grant the raise this month. His union contract does not expire until 2027, and the deadline for the new law is still several months out. But Kelley’s union, Teamsters Local 1932, pressed the county of San Bernardino to implement the raises ahead of the state’s deadline.
The pay bump means Kelley will have a little more money for his monthly expenses, such as his mortgage, car payment and car insurance.
“We have to put a roof over our heads. We’ve got to put food on the table. We’ve got to ensure that we’ve got transportation to and from work,” said Kelley, who often picks up extra shifts at an urgent care clinic on weekends.
Newsom set health care workers on a path to a minimum wage of $25 an hour when he signed the law, Senate Bill 525, last October. It has confused workers because the pace of the raises depends largely on where someone works, and it exempts certain facilities entirely.
The deadline to implement this law has been a moving target, too. Looking for ways to alleviate the state’s budget deficit, Newsom and lawmakers last month agreed to push back the deadline to at least Oct. 15.
Nonetheless, Teamster leaders said about 1,000 of their members who work for San Bernardino County will see a raise now. Housekeeping and linen workers, who are among the lowest paid, will get $18 an hour, the base set by the new law for this year. That’s $2 an hour more than the statewide minimum wage of $16 an hour.
Teresa Preciado hopes the law will help her department retain workers. Preciado is an occupational therapy assistant at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, a hospital operated by San Bernardino County. She makes above the minimum wage and the law won’t necessarily benefit her directly, but it will help the rehab aides she works with.
Preciado said often young health workers start their careers at public hospitals, get some experience under their belt and then leave for better-paying positions in the private sector.
“We’re kind of like this stepping stone, like people come in and think ‘hey a hospital job would look great on my resume,’ and they don’t stay,” Preciado said. “That consistently happens, unfortunately, and it kind of just affects the operations of the hospital.”
California unions lobbied for minimum wage hike
The labor union SEIU California spearheaded the push for the minimum wage law after years of campaigning for higher wages at the local level and after taking on dialysis companies in failed ballot initiatives.
Across the state, about 426,000 California health workers are projected to benefit from the law, according to estimates from the Labor Center at UC Berkeley. On average, these workers will earn about $6,400 more a year or just over $500 a month, the center’s research shows.
The law also could indirectly benefit other workers because employers may find they have to pay more to attract and retain employees. The county of San Bernardino, for example, cited wanting to remain competitive as a reason for implementing the minimum wage increase ahead of the state deadline.
Some employers were already moving in that direction. Last year, the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions secured a labor agreement that boosted the minimum wage for employees there to $25 per hour.
“Even without the law, many health care employers were already providing or thinking about providing wage increases that are greater than we’ve seen historically to address the recruitment and retention challenges,” said Laurel Lucia, health care program director at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “But if we didn’t have this (law), wage increases probably wouldn’t occur at the same level or systematically.”
That’s because it is labor unions that usually push for wage hikes on behalf of their members. In California, only about 18% of workers are covered by a union contract. The health care minimum wage, Lucia said, helps level the field for health workers who do not participate or benefit from labor negotiations.
Not all health workers get a raise
As the law slowly begins to roll out, workers are beginning to understand that some of them won’t see $25 perhaps until 2033. Others are learning that their workplaces are exempt, meaning they won’t be getting a raise at all, at least not because of this law.
Some workers who have reached out to CalMatters with questions about the law have expressed disappointment in recently learning from their employers that they are not eligible for a pay increase.
For example, minimum wage employees at small private practices or doctor groups with 24 or fewer doctors are excluded — the doctors’ lobby successfully lobbied for small practices to be exempt when the law was being crafted.
Researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimate that about 70,000 low wage workers are employed by medical groups with fewer than 25 physicians and therefore excluded from the law.
The law also excludes about another 70,000 workers at stand-alone nursing homes. That’s because the minimum wage law states that skilled nursing facilities, or nursing homes, will be included only when the state sets a separate standard dictating how much of nursing homes’ revenue must be spent on patient care. Lawmakers are considering a bill, Assembly Bill 1537, that would set that standard. If that bill becomes law, it would close that gap for those nursing home workers.
Robert Gonzalez, communication coordinator for Teamsters Local 1932, said that once it came down to implementing the law, many workers discovered that the pay raises are incremental and not for all of them. “I think the way that it was publicized,” he said, “was probably different than how it actually went into action.”