Group plans compliance for Living Wage law.
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Magdalena Palma had two minutes to speak.
It was barely a yawn in the marathon Aug. 15 City Council meeting, but what she said was enough to provoke City Councilor David Coss to call for an investigation.
Palma alleged she was threatened by her employer, Professional Home Health Cafe, who unsuccessfully sought that evening an exemption to the city's Living Wage law.
Palma has worked for a local disabled elderly woman for two years and spoke in Spanish, using an interpreter. "They didn't tell us anything about the living wage," Palma says. "They just said I would be fired the next day and that [without the exemption] they would be forced to put our clients in nursing homes. They were using our emotional attachment to our clients against us."
If they had received the exemption, Professional Home Health Care and Heritage Home Health Care would not have had to comply with the law that raises employees' wages.
(Non-profit providers whose primary income is provided by Medicaid already are exempted from the ordinance.)
While the question of compliance with the Living Wage ordinance for the companies was settled the night of the vote, questions about Palma's allegations remain.
Kevin Enslin, director of operations for PHHC, says the allegations stem not from a company-wide campaign to silence workers but from misguided remarks directed at Palma by a company receptionist who had no "authority to speak for the company…she just spoke out of line. I'm not going to fire her any more than I'm going to fire the woman who spoke out against us."
Enslin is less reticent to dismiss the legitimacy of the threat that Palma's client-one of roughly 150 patients served by PHCC's housekeeping service-could be forced into a nursing home.
"Is there any validity to it?" Enslin says. "If we can't find somebody to take [the patient], hell yeah."
PHHC and HHHC argued that without the exemption both companies would be forced to jettison hundreds of employees and patients to stay financially afloat.
"A company like McDonald's can raise the prices of their hamburgers to offset those costs, we can't," Enslin says. "We have nowhere else to place that cost. You can't make a company stay in business when it's consistently losing money. If you go belly up, you go belly up."
Enslin estimates that PHHC-which leans on Medicaid for most of its income-is currently losing 20 cents for every hour billed to its housekeeping staff, a number Enslin says will increase significantly when the $8.50 is raised to $9.50 on Jan. 1.
For now, Enslin says PHHC has put a moratorium on accepting new clients and will wait until after the new year to decide whether to transition current patients to other providers and scrap its housekeeping services, a move that will eliminate about 150 jobs.
Opponents of the exemption find the idea that paying workers $9.50 will force providers out of business laughable. "It's a shame that people continue to try and find ways around the ordinance," Tomás Rivera of the Living Wage Network says. "I think there are a lot of people who don't realize that this is a humanitarian issue. They push that to the back of their minds and focus instead on their bottom line."
Now that the exemption has been defeated, Rivera says LWN will focus its efforts on an enforcement campaign to monitor businesses suspected of not complying with the ordinance. It's a job that Coss-who says an investigation into Palma's allegations is still pending-admits isn't being done by city government.
"I don't think the city-to my knowledge-has taken any enforcement actions since the ordinance went into effect," Coss says. "I don't think there is any active looking for violations as much as it's taken on a complaint basis."
The complaints are generally few and far between. Rivera says many employers fail to report noncompliance out of fear of retaliation from their employers, something Rivera says he experienced first-hand when he approached employees of PHHC and HHC during the LWN push to have the exemption denied.
"A lot of people were standoffish," Rivera says. "The impression I got was that people were told not to speak with us. I found that kind of strange. But it made sense after talking to Magdalena."
Palma, for her part, is glad she stood her ground. "Why shouldn't I speak up?" Palma says. "We already don't have any benefits, no insurance, no overtime…I don't want to cause any problems for my client, I just want to get what I deserve."
