By Margaret Allen - Staff Writer

Dallas will require private contractors who supply the city with garbage collectors, janitors and lawn care workers to increase the wages they pay if City Council member Angela Hunt gets her way.

The Dallas City Council will be briefed May 7 on paying a "living wage" to laborers it hires through third-party providers, said Hunt, who represents council District 14.

Hunt said she wants an ordinance passed in the next few months, but only after council members discuss the issue. Key to the process is a formal city staff briefing, and a background report being prepared now by graduate students at the School of Urban/Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Arlington.

The issue surfaced in late 2007 with the city's renewal of a contract with CTJ Maintenance in Irving for day laborers. Hunt is disturbed that the people are earning only the federal minimum wage, now $5.85 an hour.

"That's personally very troubling to me," she said. "To me it's not just a matter of insulting, but economics. No one can support a family on the federal minimum wage."

The city has third-party labor contracts for janitorial services, temporary labor and security services, according to a Dallas city staff document supplied Feb. 20 to council members.

More than 150 cities and counties nationwide have so-called "living wage ordinances," said Jen Kern, director of the Living Wage Resource Center in Washington D.C. They change by area, based on local costs, especially housing. No city or county in Texas has such an ordinance, Kern said.

Living-wage critics, including Carl F. Horowitz at the National Legal and Policy Center in Falls Church, Va., say setting a living-wage standard only benefits public-sector unionized employees because cities will reduce contract labor. It would be better to build the skills of the poor, Horowitz has said in published writings.

The living-wage movement is a backlash against Congress, which didn't raise minimum wage for 10 years until 2007, said Enid Arvidson, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

"Minimum-wage workers make less now, in real terms, than in 1994, in terms of buying power," she said. "So a lot of cities have taken it on themselves to rectify (that situation)."

In real terms, the federal minimum wage is well below its historical value, said Jared Bernstein, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington D.C. Minimum wage is not adjusted for inflation, so it declines in value every year. Minimum wage value, in today's dollars, peaked at $8 an hour in the late 1960s, Bernstein said.

Bernstein said cities and counties paying a living wage have seen little impact on their budgets because the added cost is fairly insignificant.

"Cities are saying, 'We want our money spent on a higher quality of jobs,'" Bernstein said. "(A living wage) is a useful intervention to try and put money into the pockets of a small group of workers who perform important services."

Sources couldn't supply a living-wage figure for North Texas. Austin-based Universal Living Wage Campaign says living wage there is $13.19 an hour to keep a one-bedroom apartment, and $10.90 for an efficiency.

The City of Dallas' largest user of low-wage contract labor is its sanitation services department. It hires more than 100 people a day to pick up garbage and litter and distribute fliers, said Director Mary Nix.

CTJ Maintenance gets $7.89 an hour for each laborer, then pays minimum wage, any benefits and worker's compensation, Nix said.

By City of Dallas policy, permanent part-time employees get $8.16 an hour. Increasing city contracts to that would bump contract labor costs up by $683,465 annually, said the briefing. To cover it, the city could increase sanitation fees by 17 cents a month from $19.53 to $19.70, and increase the tax rate by 2 cents for other general fund contracts, the briefing says.

"That's a much more direct route than this trickle down," Hunt said. "Why don't we just address this issue a little more directly and a little more fairly? These are not handouts."