DOWNEY – Members of local medical labor groups celebrated at city hall on Tuesday when the City Council voted 4-0 to establish a $25 per hour minimum wage for eligible healthcare workers working in Downey’s private hospitals.

The new ordinance applies to privately-owned healthcare facilities located within the city, including licensed general acute and psychiatric hospitals, hospital-based facilities, licensed dialysis clinics and psychiatric health facilities, and all facilities that are part of an Integrated Delivery System.

While the measure relates to both clinical and non-clinical staff, it does not apply to managers and supervisors.

The law also forbids cuts in hours, staffing, or services to raise wages.

The decision follows a successful petition campaign (requiring nearly 6,500 signatures) by proponents of the wage change.

Council members were given the option to send the initiative to November’s ballot for voter approval, approve it outright as an ordinance, or order an impact report to be returned within 30 days, after which they would be required to make a decision.

The push for improved wages comes as some healthcare workers – weary from working through the pandemic – argued that they were struggling to make ends meet in addition to coping with the physical, emotional, and mental burdens of their jobs.

“Healthcare workers have a unique job; this pandemic has shown that our job is unique, and that we deal with diseases that are communicable like Covid-19,” said Gabriel Montoya, who works at Kaiser Permanente and is a member of the SEIU-UHW union.

“We also deal with patients who are going through mental health crisis, and we have to be there to take care of them. We deal with parents whose children are ill, and we have to be the ones to comfort them and take care of their kids.

“We want to do that job, we love serving our communities, but it doesn’t make sense to have healthcare workers doing that work, and having them make $16, $18 dollars an hour when we know in LA County just to pay rent a family has to make at least $70,000 a year.”

Not all in attendance were in favor of the initiative.

Critics called the initiative “flawed” and “inequitable,” arguing that a majority of healthcare staff in Downey would not be eligible.

“[The Hospital Association of Southern California] strongly urges the city council to refer this measure to the ballot for the Downey voters to decide,” said Adena Tessler, regional vice president of HASC.

“We also request the city order an economic analysis prior to taking any action, so that the city council and voters are fully informed of the potential economic impacts.”

“[The initiative] targets only private hospital facilities and their workers, excluding many providers serving the most vulnerable communities in Downey,” she continued. “Our research has found that the workers at 65% of the healthcare facilities in Downey would be excluded from this benefit.”

Councilman Mario Trujillo said that Downey’s hospitals “will be okay.”

“These last two years, the healthcare industry has come under the microscope, and the plight of the health workers, we hear you,” said Trujillo.

“I remember clearly, the intersection of Bellflower and Imperial Highway, ‘Heroes work here’…In thinking of healthcare workers, either we think they’re heroes or they’re not. The fact of the matter is, they were going to work while some of us had the luxury of being able to work behind a computer.”

“I’m convinced that Kaiser and PIH will be okay, even if this ordinance is passed,” he continued. “I have an obligation to do what’s best for the residents and for the future of the city.

Will this deter some clinics, maybe other healthcare providers from coming into the city? Perhaps. But I cannot stop thinking about the workers that had to go day in and day out towards danger.”

Councilman Donald La Plante clapped back at hospital representatives.

“When I first heard of this, my initial reaction was to put this to the voters, and sort of wondered if we should be doing, frankly, decent wages sector by sector,” said La Plante.

“I would be very happy to support an ordinance that includes the rest of the healthcare workers, as apparently our hospital association thinks we should do. We can’t mandate public hospitals for the county, or the University of California, or the federal government what they pay; that’s a duplicitous statement by the hospital council.”

La Plante, holding up a mailer he had received in opposition of the wage increase, said “he knew exactly how [the hospital association] would have treated this thing if we put it on the ballot.”

“They would have been putting out things like, ‘Reject the unequal pay measure.’ Instead of talking about whether healthcare workers deserve a fair wage, they’d be trying to play healthcare workers against each other, the same way negative campaigns work on everything else,” said La Plante.

“Any thought I had of putting it to the voters changed the minute I got your mailing; you put me on the other side.”

Councilwoman Claudia Frometa was forced to remove herself from the discussion due to her employment with Kaiser Permanente.

There were 10 potential cities where the initiative was filed, including Los Angeles, Anaheim, Inglewood, Long Beach, Monterey Park, Culver City, Baldwin Park, Duarte, and Lynwood.

Downey joins Los Angeles in setting the $25 wage minimum, after Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti signed it into law last week.

The ordinance goes into effect 30 days after approval, per the city charter.