All permanent full-time employees of the San Diego Community College District (SDCCD) will now be paid a minimum of $63,606 annually, officials announced this week.
The SDCCD serves a large portion of San Diego County's higher-eduction pie: Nearly 80,000 students attend its four campuses at San Diego City College, San Diego Mesa College, San Diego Miramar College and the San Diego College of Continuing Education.
Maintenance worker Edith Rangel, who is married and is raising a 5-year-old and a 9-year-old, is one of 250 workers whose income was boosted. Her raise bumps her pay from $22.13 an hour to $30.58, an increase of $338 per week, or nearly $18,000 a year. In aggregate, the school will now be on the hook for nearly $16 million paying just that group of employees.
“I’m excited and I’m grateful,” Rangel said in a news release SDCCD sent out this week. “This will help my family and this will help me.”
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In the immediate future, the raises will cost the school district about $1.5 million in the current fiscal year, according to SDCCD, but in the future, the "cost will be borne by deducting $1.5 million from new revenue coming from the state to community college districts through an annual cost-of-living allowance."
How did the district arrive at the $30.58 figure? It wasn't by accident — in fact, it was based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator, which has found that "two working adults raising two children in the San Diego metropolitan area need to make $30.58 per hour to support themselves and their family. A single adult with no children must earn $22.31 to support themselves," according to the SDCCD.
“We recognize the dignity of every individual in our community and the value of their work,” SDCCD’s Acting Chancellor Gregory Smith said in the news release. “As the costs of housing and living in San Diego have increased significantly in recent years, this investment safeguards against our employees falling into housing insecurity and relying on public services.”
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The $30.58 Rangel and her co-worker David Barragan will be making is nearly double California's $16 minimum wage.
“This is a much-appreciated move,” the single father of a teenage daughter said in the news release. “I was barely getting by, even working two jobs.”
Temporary workers will see more in their checks, too, since the minimum wage for them rose to $22.31 per hour.
