By Khalida Sarwari
San Jose State University students are launching an effort today to collect signatures for an initiative to increase the city’s minimum wage on the November ballot.
The signature gathering will take place all over the city beginning today and through the next three months, including supermarkets, farmers’ markets, and at community events.
Their goal is to collect 30,000 signatures, though only 19,200 are required to qualify the measure for the ballot, according to Scott Myers-Lipton, a sociology professor at San Jose State.
The idea to raise San Jose’s minimum wage from $8 to $10 was born about a year ago in Myers-Lipton’s social justice course.
It began as a class project and since then, students in every subsequent class have been building on the work of the four students who initially undertook the project.
“What’s kind of unique is that they’re working within the democratic process,” Myers-Lipton said. “They’re not out protesting, they decided to actually change an economic policy by using the ballot initiative process.”
The students are mainly working-class students in Silicon Valley who are working 25 to 30 hours a week to pay for their tuition, which has doubled since 2007, Myers-Lipton said.
“Here we are with a higher cost of living and a lower minimum wage,” Myers-Lipton said. “This is giving steps, giving policy, giving shape to the cries of ‘how do we make our society more fair?'”
San Francisco’s minimum wage of $10.24 is currently the highest in the nation, but on March 1, will be second to Sante Fe, New Mexico, where the minimum wage will increase from $9.80 to $10.29 due to a cost-of-living increase.
For anyone who is interested, the petition is available for signing every Saturday and Sunday at the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, located at 2102 Almaden Road, Suite 107, in San Jose.
