Initiative to Ban the Living Wage Fails

After failing to collect enough signatures, Councilmember Carl DeMaio abandoned his deceptive ballot initiative that would have abolished San Diego’s Living Wage law.

DeMaio and the city contractors who bankrolled the effort have vowed to gather their forces and re-file the destructive initiative for a future election.

CPI actively opposed the measure and worked to alert voters and media that it was a sham and would ban the Living Wage Ordinance, which requires companies with city contracts to pay more than minimum wage.

Despite wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid signature-collectors and hiding the destructive measure behind rosy promises, DeMaio failed to collect sufficient signatures to qualify for the ballot. He abandoned his threatened legal challenge to the Registrar of Voters’ count.

Besides living wages, the initiative also would have eliminated local hiring rules and other important contracting standards. At the same time, it would have forced outsourcing of many essential city services like water treatment to private contractors.

None of those impacts were disclosed to people signing the petitions, who were misled with false statements that the measure would enact transparency and cost-saving.

DeMaio and his supporters have bragged that they will make the ballot measure a “model of reform across the state and nation.” Joel Foster, of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, has analyzed the DeMaio initiative and called it “the most far-reaching effort ever to ban living wage ordinances or anything similar to them in a permanent way.”