How minimal is minimum (when it comes to wages across the state of Ill.)?

It has been awhile since I have had to work a job that paid minimum wage – so long that I recall being paid $3.25 an hour.

RAUNER: $7.25?

In fact, I suspect most people don’t give much thought to the issue; unless they happen to be in circumstances under which that is all anyone wants to pay them – and those employers go out of their way to complain that even that amount of money is too much.

SO I’M GUESSING it’s going to be a bit of a shock to many people as this election cycle we’re now in will force them to give a thought to just how little someone can be paid for their work.

Currently, employers in Illinois are required to pay their hourly workers no less than $8.25 per hour (which I would have thought of as a fortune back when I was 16 and didn’t know any better).

Gov. Pat Quinn is on the record as supporting an increase of the state minimum wage to $10 per hour. While voters in Chicago will be asked to vote on a referendum question as to whether the minimum wage ought to be boosted to $15 per hour.

Which is the rate that many of those organized labor protests outside of fast food franchise restaurants are demanding. I can recall when I was in junior high school, one of my fellow students felt the need to boast that her father had a $15 hourly salary – which was meant to sound impressive.

THEN AGAIN, $15 an hour doesn’t buy as much as it did a third of a century ago.

On the Republican side of the electoral equation, most of the candidates for governor are trying to avoid saying anything about the issue. Why tick off poor people who can vote (even though I suspect some GOP types wish that somehow the vote could be taken from them)?

QUINN: $10?

Except for Bruce Rauner, the wealthy venture capitalist and friend of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He used a candidate forum in the Quad Cities to say he wants to drop the state’s minimum wage, although in recent days he's tried to back track by saying he merely wants to study the issue.

A reduction is possible because the U.S. government has a $7.25 per hour minimum wage that applies across the nation, unless individual states wish to go higher. Illinois does. Indiana – for example – does not, which translates even at higher pay scales into the idea among Indiana residents that they have to come work in Illinois to make real money.

RAUNER SPEWS RHETORIC about wanting Illinois to be “competitive” with other states, implying that companies will want to locate elsewhere because they can save a buck (literally) on labor costs.

CHICAGO VOTERS: $15???

Actually, it just shows him taking sides, and it certainly isn’t with organized labor. This will be yet another reason why some of the unions in this state will decide to put their campaign cash into supporting anybody BUT Bruce.

Of course, some of the national organizations are choosing to give their cash to Quinn instead of a Republican primary campaign that they probably wouldn’t support in the November general election.

There are going to be a lot of choices for people who wouldn’t otherwise bother to even think about the issue. It will be curious to see who winds up prevailing, and how much of a statement it winds up making about the value of labor in Illinois.

AS FOR RAUNER, his attitude on this issue and other related questions winds up coming across as someone who doesn’t value the labor that does the work that enables companies to succeed.

It makes him seem like someone who wants to blame his employees for the fact that his profit margin isn’t higher. He’d better not be surprised when such an attitude winds up costing him votes come the March 18 primary.

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Does City Council need a jolt from the public to get them to act properly?

Council chambers weren't quite this empty, but it wasn't far off either. Photograph provided by City of Chicago.

On the one hand, I can’t say that the City Council’s behavior earlier this week surprises me, or that their actions caused any serious harm.

But the indifference expressed by the aldermen is dismaying. Eleven ought to be Luis Aparicio’s retired uniform number, NOT the number of council members who thought it worth their time to show up for a City Council meeting.

I’M REFERRING TO the special meeting of the council that was supposed to take place Monday, but didn’t because most aldermen didn’t bother to show up. Of the 50 aldermen, at least 26 need to be on hand for any official action to take place.

They didn’t even come close to a quorum. So nothing happened.

What died politically as a result were a series of referenda that officials, including city Clerk/mayoral hopeful Miguel del Valle, had wanted placed on the Feb. 22 municipal election ballot.

Monday was a deadline for the council to take action to place questions on the ballot allowing voters to have a say whether more police officers should be hired, city officials should try to renegotiate their horrid parking meter lease, or financial transactions at the LaSalle Street exchanges should be taxed.

SO NOW, UNLESS voters show the initiative to undertake petition drives to place the issues on the ballot, these questions won’t be on the ballot.

Now I realize that even if these issues had made it to the ballot, they were merely advisory questions. There was no binding legal authority for city government officials to act in accordance with the results of the referenda.

They were just a chance for people to express their opinion. And we all realize how little the city officials themselves care about public opinion – they view it as a lot of meaningless noise that gets in the way of city business being conducted.

I even realize that on the issue of the parking meter lease, it doesn’t matter how much people complain, or if city officials were willing to get themselves involved in that fiasco. Our city government signed a valid contract and is now stuck with a bad deal.

I SUPPOSE THE company that is now getting all that money we pump into the parking meters every time we park on a city street (personally, I try to avoid operating an automobile within the city limits) could, out of the generosity of their hearts, decide to renegotiate.

Then again, we could also have a White Sox/Cubs World Series in 2011. Fat chance!

So I suppose the aldermen who didn’t bother to show up would claim they were merely ignoring a meeting whose activity had no legitimacy – although Forty-Ninth Ward Alderman Joe Moore told the Chicago Sun-Times he thinks soon-to-be-former Mayor Richard M. Daley personally told the aldermen not to bother to show up.

After all, why even discuss these embarrassing issues (a 75-year parking meter lease where the city has already spent its share of the money only two years into the agreement) when the referendums can’t do much?

NOW I WILL be the first to admit that I detest political blather. Government officials gathering together to grandstand and make pronouncements about issues when they can’t truly act upon them is a nauseating concept.

Yet I still have enough respect for a City Council as an institution (I think some of its members are unworthy of serving in that legislative body) that I take offense to the idea of 39 out of 50 aldermen deciding they can’t be bothered to show up for a meeting.

It’s not like the council has daily sessions (it’s not Congress or the Illinois General Assembly). It would have been one morning out of the working lives of the aldermen – most of whom have business or legal interests that are enhanced by the fact that they are also elected officials.

MEEKS: Taking city to the people?



It actually makes me wonder if Rev./state Sen./mayoral hopeful James Meeks is on to something with his latest campaign pronouncement. He plans to hit all 50 wards during the next 50 days, and earlier this week said he wants to have city officials spent more time in the neighborhoods – rather than huddle amongst themselves all the time at City Hall.

“WHY SHOULD EVERYONE be forced to come to City Hall to conduct their city business,” Meeks said, in explaining his proposal to have city department heads spend one day per week in the neighborhoods.

Now I realize the individual aldermen do spend some significant time in their own wards, although there are times I wonder if their local knowledge is too limited to which of their neighbors vote regularly and which do not?

Perhaps a little less time spent studying the vote tallies would mean more attention paid to the actual concerns of the residents. Heck, that might even get those people who can’t be bothered to vote to actually show up and cast a ballot, once in a while.

It would definitely make the aldermen realize how silly they looked this week when only 11 of them bothered to be present.

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Referenda are what an election’s about

A part of me has always thought referenda were the unappreciated part of an Election Day’s activities.

While it is usually the “top of the ticket” that dominates the public’s attention when it comes to casting a ballot, I always get a kick out of seeing just what types of issues (rather than candidates) wind up making it onto the ballot.

IT IS ALL about a question, to which the people get to say “yes” or “no.” Sometimes, our vote gives us the ability to play God. We can literally send a cause to its demise with our “no” vote.

And if we choose to vote “yes,” we can force elected officials to take actions that they wouldn’t dream of doing under any other circumstances.

This time around, voters in parts of Cook County are being asked to consider 49 differing questions. That doesn’t mean 49 different issues, since some issues are being asked of voters in differing parts of the county.

But it is a chance for the voter to take a stand and know that collectively, we can force people to be heard.

SOME OF THESE issues are purely local.

Take Park Ridge, where officials want to build a new police station. At a cost of just over $16 million, they need local voters to approve the use of tax dollars for the construction to take place.

A similar situation exists in Kenilworth, where local voters along the North Shore will get to decide whether tax dollars, a private foundation, or no one, should pay for the renovation of a local athletic field that would include installation of artificial turf.

What about in Berwyn, where local voters are being asked whether there ought to be restrictions against medical clinics being located too close to residential neighborhoods in that west suburban town.

OR TAKE SCHILLER Park, where local voters are being asked questions about two issues that intrigue me. One is whether that suburb near O’Hare International Airport should try to crack down on the number of taverns it has with liquor licenses allowing them to stay open until 4 a.m.

Another is whether they should participate in efforts to reduce the amount of freight train traffic that passes through their town. As one who has lived in places where the railroad crossings were the great unknown factor in trying to decide how long it would take to get from “Point A” to “Point B” (it depended on whether you got stuck by a train), that would strike me as an absolute “yes” vote.

But I don’t live in Schiller Park, so ultimately I don’t have a say. This will be one of those cases left to the locals who have to live with all those freight trains passing through their town and inconveniencing the locals with their noise and disruption of automobile and pedestrian traffic flow.

Then, there are issues where certain people with causes are trying to stir up the locals.

HOW ELSE TO explain the referenda questions for voters in Barrington, Hanover and Palatine townships (far northwest suburban Cook County)? Those people are being asked whether their home communities should “disconnect” from Cook County.

People who support this idea usually like the idea of breaking off to become their own separate county, even if they would be a small, rather insignificant county on their own – rather than a part of the largest county in the Midwest (not just Illinois).

What I couldn’t help but notice is that they’re no longer using the word “secession” to describe what it is they want to do. I guess they have come to realize that the word gives off some sort of Southern rebel overtone that makes them seem like would-be traitors to the greater cause.

Instead, they come off as people with way too much free time on their hands to be thinking of such concepts as disconnection (which sounds more like something that happens when you don’t pay your phone bill on time).

THEN, THERE’S THE referendum question being asked of voters in 14 of the 30 townships of suburban Cook County – one that presumes it can make a powerful political statement because I expect just about everybody to blindly vote “yes” regardless of what would really happen if the implied action were taken.

The referendum in question informs people that a 1 percent hike in the county’s portion of sales taxes has been in effect for one year. Voters in all parts of Cook County are asked to say “yes” or “no” to whether the increase should continue to be collected.

How many people would be willing to allow the services they receive as a result of county government to be slashed if the county’s revenue were to suddenly decline due to a tax reduction?

With such potential for action turning up on the ballots being used in Tuesday’s elections, does anyone really believe the most interesting thing that will occur is soon-to-be-former Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley beating up on la Latina loca Rosanna Pulido to finish off the congressional term of Rahm Emanuel in the U.S. House of Representatives?

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EDITOR’S NOTE: The Cook County clerk’s office makes this list available of all the (http://www.voterinfonet.com/sub/view_all_referenda.asp) referenda on Tuesday’s ballots.