Wages Can’t Wait: Service Workers Action & Relief Fund

The devastating fires that have swept across Los Angeles County have affected millions of low-wage workers and low-income communities. The two lowest-wage workforces in particular - restaurant workers and incarcerated workers - have come together under the CA Living Wage for All Coalition and now have launched the LA Service Workers’ Relief Initiative to use initial emergency relief as a building block toward lasting policy change that will improve the lives of millions of residents of LA County. 

With hundreds of restaurants burned, closed, or closing, hundreds of thousands of restaurant workers have lost their jobs and will have difficulty finding work in their chosen profession anywhere near their previous jobs. Since the restaurant industry is the largest employer of immigrant workers in LA and nationwide, these workers are also soon to be facing even more crisis with a threatened attack by the Trump Administration that will make it dangerous to seek new employment. 

Meanwhile, one third of the firefighters statewide, and therefore one third of the firefighters fighting the blazes in LA County, are incarcerated individuals who are paid  up to $2 per day (as little as $.08-$.11 per hour) to risk their lives saving others’ lives. The subminimum wage for incarcerated workers exists because of the exception to the 13th Amendment that allows for slavery in the case of incarceration. These workers’ literal slave wages are not even enough to cover the high commissary costs that incarcerated individuals must pay to access basic necessities for hygiene and survival while incarcerated. 

The November 2024 elections were a clear signal to Democrats and all elected officials that they must address the cost of living crisis faced by working people immediately, or continue to lose elections. While the current minimum wage in Los Angeles is $17.27, the MIT Living Wage calculator that even a single individual with no children in LA County (though nearly half of all minimum wage earners in LA have children) needs $26.63 per hour to cover the basic costs of food, transportation, and housing, and one person in a two-parent, two-child household needs $48.36 to cover the same.