Gavin Newsom Signs Law Raising Minimum Wage to $25 for California Health Care Workers
Kaiser Permanente employees on strike on Oct. 4, 2023. The workers held a demonstration in front of the Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento location demanding higher wages and more staffing. [Photo by Miguel Gutierrez Jr., CalMatters]
What earlier this year seemed like a long shot is now a done deal: Gov. Gavin Newsom [Friday] signed a law that will raise the pay for hundreds of thousands of California health care workers and set them on a path to a $25 minimum wage.
Newsom’s signing of the law means medical technicians, nursing assistants, custodians and other support staff will see a gradual wage hike that rolls out starting next year.
Newsom’s approval of the new minimum wage for medical workers follows his signature on a separate law mandating a new pay floor for fast-food workers. Starting next April, fast food employees will make at least $20 an hour.
Between the two new industry-specific minimum wage increases, about 900,000 Californians are expected to see their pay climb thanks to new state laws. For all other workers, the statewide minimum wage rises to $16 on Jan. 1.
The victory for health workers was long in the making. It unfolded in the final days of the legislative year when the hospital lobby and health care providers announced a rare deal with labor unions.
Health care employers got behind a plan to raise the minimum wage for their industry, and unions agreed to a 10-year moratorium on sponsoring local ballot measures to force pay raises at hospitals and other medical facilities. That concession was valuable to health care employers because unions last year floated local pay ballot measures in several Southern California cities.
Kidney dialysis providers scored a separate deal: for four years the Service Employees International Union will not push for legislation or ballot measures targeting dialysis centers. SEIU has gone after dialysis centers three times in the last five years via the ballot, with each one costing the health care industry tens of millions of dollars in political spending. Voters rejected all three dialysis initiatives.
Having both labor and industry onboard allowed Senate Bill 525, authored by Sen. María Elena Durazo of Los Angeles, to get through the Legislature.
This new law is expected to benefit about 469,000 employees statewide, including some who earn slightly more but who would get a corresponding boost, according to an analysis by UC Berkeley’s Labor Center.
Eneryk Santana is one of those employees. He works as a medical assistant at a clinic in Chula Vista but lives in Tijuana. He makes an early morning cross-border commute everyday. Sometimes he sits in hours-long traffic. It’s exhausting, but Santana says many colleagues do the same as a way to avoid expensive housing costs on the California side of the border.
He recently started earning $25.50 an hour, up from the $22 he was making a few months ago. He expects he’d be eligible for another corresponding increase when the minimum wage for all health workers goes up.
“It is motivating, and it’s starting to feel like I am getting closer to my goal” of moving back to San Diego, Santana said.
How soon workers reach this level of pay will depend on the type of facility they work in. For example, community clinics like where Santana works will be required to implement a $21 minimum wage by next year and reach $25 by 2027.
- Dialysis clinics and large health systems with more than 10,000 workers would pay a minimum wage of $23 an hour in 2024, $24 in 2025, and $25 in 2026.
- Hospitals with a high mix of Medi-Cal and Medicare patients, as well as rural independent hospitals would have to pay workers $18 an hour in 2024. That rate would increase 3.5% annually until it reaches $25 in 2033.
- Community clinics would start the pay increase at $21 per hour in 2024, rising to $22 in 2026 and $25 in 2027.
- Other health care employers would increase their minimum wage to $21 per hour in 2024, $23 in 2026 and $25 by 2028.
The new law will drive up state spending because it would apply to the thousands of public employees who work in University of California hospitals and in state-run health care facilities.
An earlier version of the bill Newsom signed would have instituted a $25 minimum image immediately. That would have cost the state approximately $973.7 million a year, according to the legislative analysis. It’s unclear how much the version of the bill Newsom signed will cost the state.
State agencies did not weigh in on the bill. A wide range of business groups, medical clinics and county offices opposed the industry minimum wage hike.
Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.
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So fast food and health care get big raises, but the rest are still at 16 bucks an hour. What makes fast food workers and health care workers more important than all the other jobs?
Fast food effects peoples health. So then they need to see a health care worker.
It’s an economic issue.
Lol! Now THAT’S a tru matter!
Well played!
Rubbish, it’s a vote buying issue. How you woo woo democrats actually believe your masters give a shit about you is constant source of amusement. “Party of the working person”. Whaaa ha ha ha
Unless That is satire, you should maybe explain with some detail What the hell you’re talking about?
Apparently whoever builds automated equipment for fast food and medical industry is giving big money to politicians. What really cracks me up ,is these people working in these industries think they are going to get raises. They just putting themselves out of a job. Ever heard of a profit margin? Goods gotta go up to cover it, once your run costs get so high, it opens the door to what once was expensive technology. These 2 industries will become pretty much automated.
All unskilled labor will be subject to automation, even in healthcare. With the advance of AI. See Elysium AND Prometheus. That is not some sifi dream. We are very close to perfecting the technology. Unfortunately
The software geeks. That’s write, programming arent trained in medicine or other technologies and have no clue about the subject matter. A perfect example is any smart device. It works great for 6 months. Then does upgrades and fails, or the voice print im using to write this post. I still have to go in and rewrite, all the corrections it made for me. Cause programmers are shitheads?
These “shithead” programmers that can’t get your smart device working for more than six months are “close to perfecting” the technology to automate healthcare? The singularity is coming, but it is a few decades away.
It depends on where the profit is. Screwing over customers has almost no downside while endless requirements to replace equipment is a sure money maker. So yes, the programing for profit as opposed to benefit for the consumer is a real thing.
Health care workers provide an essential service and higher pay will help to attract qualified workers.
Fast food workers work for billion-dollar corporations that can afford to treat their workers fairly.
They just pass the increase on to the customer, so fast food prices will go up.
yes, they will serve their shareholders before their customers. Too bad free market competition between chains wont correct this.
You are naive. The increased costs of doing business is always streamlined to the consumer.
Thank god i don’t eat that garbage.
Enjoy your 20 dollar happy meal.
The companies earn enough of a profit to absorb the cost without having to raise rates. You’re right that they’ll probably raise the rates anyway and blame it on being require to pay their employees a living wage.
All in all, that’s not such a bad thing. People shouldn’t be eating that garbage anyway. I sure don’t.
Typical liberal. Do you honestly not understand that most of those businesses are franchises, owned by individuals who probably make a little better than $100k,?(and McD’s is one of the better paying franchises).Starting a McDonalds franchise costs WELL NORTH of a MILLION dollars to boot.Labor is one of your biggest costs. It is SO obvious you have never run a businness..
$16/hr ….? doin’ what ?
Lowering the value of the dollar.
Minimum wage laws are not drivers of inflation.In fact middle class spending power is needed for a healthy economy. Minting currency instead of spending treasure (inflationary spending) is the predominant cause of inflation.
They are employed by giant corporations who profit millions or billions of dollars, and can easily afford to pay a living wage. But you make a good point, why shouldn’t minimum wage be a living wage for everyone?
Because the nature of not-for-profit anything is stagnation,and decay? It’s the great reward that generates innovation that has risk. You sound like there’s no risk for individuals in stocks markets. They lose sometimes you know.
Anyway various retirement systems are the majority holders of stocks. Which is very, very unfortunate for the country when most of those are government retirement systems to that pay out generously when times are good but then demand those benefits continue when the stock markets loses. That that’s some situation- raking it in without the risk of loss.
We are so fucking done as a society in this state
We need the third world war to shake things up and get everybody moving in the right direction. Between Israel, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, China, Taiwan, North Korea, and Iran I think we are closer than we know, how could I forget US.
This is disgusting:
Sometimes he sits in hours-long traffic. It’s exhausting, but Santana says many colleagues do the same as a way to avoid expensive housing costs on the California side of the border.
Bidenomics is going to make that $25 chicken feed over the next couple years. He has completely blown open the wealth gap in America. He made sure to get Hunter 100s of millions though. He is making the poor poorer everyday he’s in office. I thought democrats were for the working man, apparently that’s a lie.
All politicians say what they think people want to hear. Meanwhile, the top 1/10th of 1% sit back and pull all the strings.
Because the remaining 9/10ths can be always led by their own greed into service.
aww, but California’s the rebel state …lol.
What specific actions on bidens part have increased the wealth gap? This problem has been getting worse for many decades regardless of who is in the office.
His green policy, next.
State jobs are already attractive because they come with sick leave, personal days off, vacation days, retirement plans, security against lay offs, union rights guarantees, etc. In fact, California State pensions are the biggest source of debt for the State and can not be cut back just be cause the State has no money to cover it. They only way it can be reduced in the future is by not hiring to replace workers who leave. In other words, the growth of the debt is inevitable and only the debt decades into the future can be reduced by cutting services today, still paying the retirees until the current workers are old enough to make their demands at a lower rate.
“California has the fifth-highest debt of any state, with total liabilities coming out to $362.87 billion. Total assets come out to $301.1 billion, creating a $55.96 billion net debt and giving California a debt ratio of 120.5%. California’s debt and liabilities can be broken down into three categories: retirement liabilities, budgetary borrowing, and bond debt. However, combining California’s federal, state, and local debt brings California’s debt total to over $1 trillion. According to this report, the debt would cost each resident of California $33,000 or each taxpayer $74,000.” https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/debt-by-state
Nice information you provided on the link. I would think California’s debt issues go back decades with poor decisions and loans. This state is the only one that went from a surplus to deficit in six months, and it ain’t because of pensions.
Some people get a living wage. My god let’s all freak out.
The surfs are taking over the Castle.
Are the surfs from sea level rise threatening the State Capitol???
Well sea levels are rising.
Low income limit for a household of one in Humboldt is about $46,200.
https://amp.sacbee.com/news/california/article277297283.html
Median wage across the US is $28.34 per hour. Median annual salary across the US is $59,428.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-state/
Now that Newsom has “set” the minimum, what incentive are employers going to have to give raises to any of these workers so they can consider themselves “median” or average?
Now, consider this:
The median family home price in the US is $410, 200.
The median home price in CA is $799,000.
https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/
The median home price in Humboldt County is $450,000 according to the Humboldt Association of Realtors. That means someone needs $90,000 for a down payment of 20% to avoid PMI.
The average American household has $41,000 in savings.
The payment on a $450,000 house with $90,000 down on a 15 year mortgage is $3208. A wise rule of thumb is to have a 15 year mortgage on a house that is no greater than 25% of your take home pay. (Ramsey Solutions). So a person or household would need to have a monthly take home pay (after taxes, insurance, retirement) of $12,832 per month.
If Newsom and the Democrats REALLY wanted to create a livable wage in California, they would deregulate all of the restrictions government at all levels have put on building a house.
well deserved raise, but 25 buck in ten years isn’t gonna amount to much, at least in this state.
What you don’t seem to realize is that YOU are stuck with the bill.
This should delay new numbers of homeless people rising for a little bit. However, due to Bidenflation, home prices keep going up and so do the costs to borrow the money to buy a home due to rising interest rates.
When are people going to realize government is not the solution but is actually the problem?
Wondering what percentage of those “health care workers” are bureaucrats? Hair gel and his boss Aileen Getty will put the paper promises where they can consolidate the most power. Healthcare workers ( nurses and techs) are paid handsomely for their efforts.
I’d like to see this done at schools too. People who help to educate, feed, and transport our kids should be paid better than just above minimum wage.
They get paid MUCH more than “just above minimum wage” and they get summers off and every fucking holiday, with excellent benny’s and pension to boot. Are you willing to pay more taxes to fund the bloated pensions they will collect for 30 plus years? Of course not.
Well, Californians needing health care… are next to join the homeless.
—
Go figure.
Seems like there was a lot of information replaced by your ellipsis.
The first part of your statement doesn’t relate directly to the second part.
Ergo… ‘Californians needing health care won’t be able to afford it’.
(Probably true already.)
Universal single-payer.
Problem solved.
The delusion is strong among liberals that the US is capable of even doing an adequate universal single payer system. So far every government intervention with healthcare has made it worse. People forget that the US has no single national social identity like smaller countries, especially smaller European countries. And that it has an overarching Constitution that recognizes it. Each jurisdiction is jealous guarding its share of power. Universal is not a good word in the US. Heck, the State of California won’t even spread its wealth to rural places while it tries to leverage more than its fair share from other jurisdictions but go its own way against the rest of the nation.
Frankly most countries with “universal single-payer” heath care are floundering. Canada, Spain, Italy, etc. The best health care is not actually that at all. The best coverage is universal mandated purchased healthcare insurance like Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, etc. Universal Healthcare funded by taxes relies on being able to tax in good times. And those countries who relied on the flush of prosperity from the 1980s to fund health care are hitting the inevitable economic downturns. Globalization seriously dinged that tax base when it became common to escape high taxes by moving to tax friendly jurisdictions. And the change from an oil drilling source of wealth made it worse for those who didn’t plan ahead.
So, we’re stuck in a hole of our own digging and that we’re unwilling to dig out of.
There I do agree with you.
It’s sad how pathetic we’ve become.
If the US could agree to a Swiss like system, itwould work. But I doubt you would even call that acceptable. You want taxpayers to pat for health-care but likely not take individual responsibility for it.
“Zeltner says one of the crucial innovations was separating health insurance from employment, which has allowed the Swiss to keep their health insurance during the pandemic, while millions of Americans are losing theirs when they lose their jobs.
They have been able to separate the two. But instead of making the government the single payer, like in the U.K., they have made it so that a wide array of insurance companies can flourish…
There are roughly 60 private companies selling plans, but the Swiss government does take a firm hand in regulation. It mandates basic coverage that all plans must include, and the government sets the prices that can be charged for medications and procedures.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-switzerland-delivered-health-care-for-all-and-kept-its-private-insurance#transcript
How about the British one? Everyone gets basic coverage with no out of pocket expenses but people are free to purchase additional coverage if they’d like.
Britian’s healhcare coverage ranks 5th overall vs 21st for the US, they spend less than half as much per person vs the US, 2/3 as much as a percent of their GDP, and they have both a longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant mortality.
https://healthsystemsfacts.org/
When the ranking system include the cost to the patient, then the highest ranking health care systems are paid out of tax money. But it does not mean that the UK health system isn’t teetering on collapse. There have more than a couple of doctor strikes lately.
Frankly the NHS has been in crisis long before the Pandemic so how it got rated even 5th is a total mystery. I had a very rare disease diagnosis so was part of an international group online that included the UK. And those patients were constantly complaining about be diverted from treatment. The US contingent would say you need to see a such and such specialist and the UK contingent responded that their doctors wouldn’t do anything and there was only one group of specialist in the country which their doctor wouldn’t refer them to. That is in fact how I started reading everything I could on various health systems. Lots of people in NHS were very fond of not having to pay for care until they seriously need more than a bandage and found the bureaucracy insurmountable. Government health care, especially after ACA, is scary and subject to political diddling.
“Ministers have been insisting that while the waiting list was growing, the number of people having to wait more than a year for treatment was falling.However, the latest figures showed that 389,952 people in England were waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of July, up from 383,083 at the end of June.”
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/nhs-waiting-new-record-list-crisis-patients-hospital-rishi-sunak-steve-barclay-bma-b1106950.html
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jun/11/nhs-dying-statistic-crisis-healthcare-75th-anniversary
That is not what I said. In fact other countries are pretty similar to the US in covering for example, undocumented immigrants. “The Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM) reported that Italy and Spain provided the widest coverage for UI with universal access to health care. Germany, Greece, Sweden, and Switzerland only cover emergency care for UIs.” Especially considering their much lower levels of the undocumented.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7141175/
More brilliance. Problem solved huh? We just ran up half a TRILLION in debt in TWO WEEKS and liberals STILL cannot see the problem that is about to smash us in the face and pauperize us all. They want more of it. Liberalism is a mental disorder!
Well for one thing, the law says that small, rural or MediCal heavy institutions will not be included in the minimum wage increase for ten years. Which means that here in Humboldt Co there will be no increase in minimum wage for that time because it is both smaller than 250,000 and MediCal heavy. Not only will Humboldt be on the losing end again of competition for healthcare workers, it means that government monies in the form of increased workers salaries will again disproportionately go to urban areas.
Because likely some California legislator pointed out the government would be the likely one who would be required to pony up and the damned law would not have enough votes to pass.
However for some other Californians, it will increase the costs of medical care. That squeeze certainly could increase the cost of that care, depriving them of income for housing. Ellipsis or not, it doesn’t take much imagination to get the direct relationship in the first part of Bozo’s comment to the second. Probably just too great a leap for those who never pay for medical care themselves.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB525
” covered health care facility that is owned, affiliated, or operated by a county with a population of less than 250,000 as of January 1, 2023, as those terms are defined, the minimum wage for covered health care employees to be $18 per hour from June 1, 2024, to May 31, 2033, inclusive, and $25 per hour from June 1, 2033, and until as adjusted as specified.”
Good on you for at least reading it. A rarity in this comment section.
A universal single-payer would still solve the concerns you brought up:
When for-profit companies are removed from the equation, all healthcare workers across the state can be paid fair wages.
And people would no longer have to worry about permiums, co-pays, and deductibles.
That’s not really too great a leap. The rest of the world does it.
Govt does a great job with dmv, for sure they will do a great job running the health care system. 😁
Politicizing essentials systems is insane: guaranteed to waste our tax $ and to be incompetent, corrupt, optimized for political gain and to attack political enemies.
You are either incredibly naive or incredibly cynical.
And yet, the rest of the world uses a single-payer healthcare system and are getting better results for less money than we spend.
Have we really just thrown in the towel and decided we’re not even going to try anymore?
No it doesn’t. Universal single payer is not what the vast majority of countries use at all. Universal and single payer are not the same thing you apparently believe it to be.
Post-industrial nations, then.
Obviously some nations struggle to provide even the most basic services. I’d hoped you’d realize that I’m not proposing to emulate them.
No. Not what I mean. Only 17 nations have health care primarily by taxes. The vast majority who have universal coverage mandate participation in health insurance with tax funded assistance if needed.
This change is important. Do you want someone drawing your blood whose mind is somewhere else wondering how they’ll make rent this month? For those who don’t think this is fair, consider that most other countries have non-profit medicine. Wouldn’t it be nice if health care workers weren’t trying to turn a profit for investors? What if doctors were working only to help people and break even on costs? If their practice made money it could be used to pay staff (and themselves more), and to keep the office in good repair? That would be good for us all.
Hello? It would be good for all of us if it worked like that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. First, most of the North Coast isn’t included. Then government makes very bad organizer of healthcare in terms of restricting services to meet budgets and in need for paper work. ACA led to vastly increased paperwork, regulations that caused medical care to be concentrated in urban places where the voters are and placing other government objectives over the needs of its citizens. Oh sure it expands coverage theoretically but then restricts access in practice.
https://news.yahoo.com/feel-harassed-meet-doctors-france-111259511.html
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/13/bma-in-secret-talks-with-government-to-end-strikes-by-nhs-consultants
https://globalnews.ca/news/9901922/canadians-family-doctor-shortage-cma-survey/
$20/hr for Gavin
That’s an initiative I’d sign.
Instead of social justice and that feelings are more important than facts, schools should teach basic economics…
$25/hr for Social Security Beneficiaries!
My checks have gone up only 20% since 2018!
I want equity!
With the latest 3.2% increase for 2024, I’m getting a bigger increase than Kaiser Union Employees…
Here’s the biggest burn for you all:
In 2021, I refinanced my mortgage from 4.75% to 3.25%, saving $350/month, locked in for 30 years.
My savings accounts went from 0.4% interest to 5.0%, increasing my income by about $20,000/year.
Now, if I could get the fire insurance under control…
In 1976, I started working as an ancillary healthcare professional, and made about $6/hr. By 1980, I was making the delirious amount of $10.20/hr.
I didn’t make $25/hour until around 1990. My last job, I made $70/hour, and with on-call and callbacks, about $900/day.
In healthcare, they want you to do the work of 2 people, and work yourself to death while being harassed incessantly by admin and coworkers…
Fast food? Yes, I worked at MacDonalds, in 1970, and was paid $1.35/hour…
$25/hr is $52,000/year, so I assume a Quarter-Pounder with cheese and a large Fries and a Choc Shake will cost $25.
Good luck finding a place to live…
Minimum wage is a way to delete a particular worker from the workforce. I refuse to allow unhealthy fast food eating obese people provide healthcare to me. And now they will get 25$ an hour. What a joke.