S.L. mulls a living wage rule for bids

Companies that don't pay employees a living wage could take a back seat to those who do when bidding for Salt Lake City business under a proposed executive order by Mayor Rocky Anderson.

Advocates for the working poor are meeting today with Anderson staff members to review a draft order.

While municipalities giving preference to companies who pay above minimum wage is somewhat common nationally, Salt Lake would be the first one in Utah, said Bill Tibbets, anti-hunger action committee coordinator with Crossroads Urban Center.

Requiring companies to pay living wages in order to gain city contracts is prohibited under state law.

Today's meeting comes a week after Anderson met with Chief of Staff Sam Guevara and City Attorney Ed Rutan to hammer out issues related to living wage laws.

Still, Anderson remains mostly quiet about the plan, saying last week that the living wage rule is "something we're looking at." Monday calls for comment were not returned.

Most cities with such laws actually require companies that are awarded city contracts to pay their employees a living wage (roughly $8.75 an hour).

"The mayor's just looking at something for goods and services and procurement," Tibbets said. "I don't think the mayor's looking at doing something that covers the construction industry."

But for non-construction city jobs, even if a company that paid a living wage had a bid higher than another company, it could still gain the contract.

Councilman Dave Buhler and other critics of the proposal say such rules waste taxpayer dollars because they force the city to spend more money on contracts.

"We have to realize we live in a free-market system and think why should we saddle the taxpayers with extra costs to feel good or make some sort of social statements," he said.

It's unclear whether Anderson could implement a living wage rule by executive order, which wouldn't require council approval, or if such a rule would have to be made by an ordinance change, which would require council support.

Buhler said Anderson should ask the council for an ordinance change rather than try an executive order.

"The mayor would do well to propose this as an ordinance and see if there's support for doing it," Buhler said.

Any living wage rule doesn't make sense this year because it pushes the

city's cost of doing business up and many contracts the city awards, like concessions at Liberty Park, for instance, are for minimum-wage jobs done by high school students, Buhler said.

"Particularly when we're going to be facing a very difficult budget year I don't know why we would want to be unilaterally raising our costs," he said. "We could be drying up employment opportunities for students."

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E-mail: bsnyder@desnews.com