|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
Living Wage Appears Before County Personnel & Public Officials Comm. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Lehman, CCLWA
(No verified email address) |
07 Sep 2001
Modified: 05 Nov 2001 |
|
Members of the Champaign County Living Wage Association, including the author, appeared before the Champaign County Board’s Personnel and Public Officials Committee Thursday evening, Sept. 6, 2001. |
Members of the Champaign County Living Wage Association, including the author, appeared before the Champaign County Board’s Personnel and Public Officials Committee Thursday evening. They made a brief presentation on what the Living Wage is, how it would be a positive public policy, and answered questions from members of the committee.
Adopting a Living Wage would raise the wages of government employees to at least $8.49 an hour, index wages to the federal poverty level for a family of four (currently $17,650 a year for fulltime work), and ensure access to basic health care. It may also cover government money spent for goods and services to broaden the positive economic impact of adoption of a Living Wage.
A Living Wage will increase employee retention, raise morale, make the county government a preferred place of employment for the best job candidates, and generally allow workers to take responsibility for supporting their own families. Living Wage jobs result in less demand for government services, while building a broader tax base. A Living Wage benefits business by increasing disposable income spent in local businesses, attracts better workers to the community, and prevents underbidding of contracts by fly-by-night contractors through placing value on a stable workforce with high morale and low turnover.
Committee members seemed to support the goals of the Living Wage campaign. It was noted that the CCLWA has a broad coalition of community and religious groups, in addition to labor groups, which support enactment of a Living Wage policy in Champaign County. Some of the more conservative committee members had concerns about enacting a Living Wage as policy in Champaign County government. The county has been making progress in raising wages of county employees recently, although they still are not all above the Living Wage level. The county historically has had approximately 20% of its employees earning less than a Living Wage. Adopting a Living Wage would require an ongoing commitment to bringing all wages up to the current Living Wage level of $8.49 an hour, as well as maintaining a Living Wage by tying it to adjustments in the federal poverty level, on which the Living Wage is based, when it is updated in February of every year.
The committee unanimously adopted a motion to examine further the financial impact of raising current salaries to at least Living Wage level and the implications for applying a Living Wage requirement to contracts for goods and services which government would enter into. The CCLWA will also be working on several questions regarding the impact of Living Wage laws on poverty levels and employment in other localities in Illinois where it has been enacted. This information will be presented to the committee at the October meeting to guide them in making further decisions about adoption of a Living Wage policy.
For more information on the Living Wage, please visit our website: |
See also:
http://www.prairienet.org/livingwage/
|
|
Champaign County Wages |
by Concerned
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
05 Nov 2001
|
|
Has anyone ever really looked at the Law Enforcement wages for Champaign County? The deputies who serve and protect the citizens of Champaign County don't get wages that are comparable to other counties of similar size or surrounding counties. The government employees in Champaign County get an automatic wage increase once the deputies have to fight for theirs. The deputies work 24-7, 365 days a year and don't have the equipment and a good facility like most law enforcement departments have. Most all of the goverenment employees in Champaign County now work in a very nice facility. The question is; What does the county goverenment in Champaign County think about when it comes to serving and protecting their citizens? You're not going to be able to keep what you have now if you don't start taking care of them. They're already down on man power, what will they do when several more leave? |
