On Labor Day, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told the Buffalo News he supported the living wage ordinance he helped to write and get passed in 1999, when he was Masten District’s representative on the Common Council. He told News reporter Mark Sommer that the control board’s wage freeze had prevented him from granting wage increases that the law demanded, and, now that the wage freeze has been lifted, that the city’s budget was too tight to pay a living wage to seasonal workers—who, he added, are not covered by the ordinance anyway.

The city’s own Living Wage Commission disputes just about all of those claims, Brown’s assertion that he supports the living wage first and foremost. The city’s living wage ordinance requires employers contracting with the City of Buffalo to pay a minimum wage of $9.59 per hour with health benefits or $10.77 without health benefits. Of the employers that the commission has identified as covered by the law—passed in 1999 but not enacted until 2004—the most egregious offenders have been Rural/Metro Medical Services, which pays its EMTs as little as $7.90 per hour, and the City of Buffalo itself, which classifies many sanitation workers as “seasonal” to justify paying them $8.15 per hour with no benefits.

A report issued by the Living Wage Commission in June opined that the argument exempting seasonal workers, such as those employed in the Sanitation Department, was specious, in any case. Seasonal employees are only exempt under special circumstances that don’t cover most of the workers for whom the Brown administration claims exemptions, according to the commission’s lawyers. The report went on to detail the administration’s numerous failures to adhere to and enforce the living wage ordinance Brown claims credit for passing into law, as well as the mayor’s consistent unwillingness to meet with the commission to discuss resolutions.

That unwillingness to address the subject of the living wage, suspended briefly by the mayor during the Labor Day Parade and his conversation with Sommer, descended like a curtain again on Tuesday, when demonstrators delivered a letter to the mayor signed by more than 50 of the city’s religious leaders, urging the mayor to abide by and enforce the law. The letter was sent registered mail. The mayor made no comment on Tuesday and did not meet with demonstrators.

About a dozen of the letter’s signatories gathered with a host of activists and affected workers in Niagara Square on Tuesday evening for an all-night, candlelight vigil, which began with speeches and singing and slogans. The Western New York Peace Center was there, along with the UB Lawyers Guild and Students Against Sweatshops and representatives of various other social justice groups in the region. There were maybe 60 people gathered before a beautifully lit City Hall: not a bad showing for a demonstration like this in Buffalo, which is a little bit dismaying.

Among the crowd were a couple of seasonal sanitation workers, Tim Johnson and Abraham McKinney, who described their situation. They explained that the city laid them off for a week every six months in order to justify labeling them “seasonal.” McKinney has been “seasonal” for nearly seven years, he said, and hasn’t missed a day in almost three years, except for his layoff weeks—for which he received no pay. When he was first hired, he was paid $8.15 per hour with no benefits and no paid days off, and that’s what he gets today. He’s a floater, which means he’s moved from district to district, so he doesn’t always know where he’s going to work the next week.

“Normally that’s what they do to the new guys,” said Johnson, who has been on the job about three years and makes the same wage. “After about a year they try to get you in a district. Why he’s floating? I don’t know…”

Johnson is assigned to a district, but explained that full-time employees often make seasonal employees work the heavier routes. If the seasonal employees complain, they’re told they can go home, losing at best a day’s pay and at worst their jobs.

“You speak up, they try to find a way to get rid of you,” McKinney said. “They tell you, ‘Hey, you got a job. You don’t want it, we got someone to put in your place.’”

“And then they bring on their young little relatives” and quickly make them full-time employees, Johnson added. “They haven’t even been there a year, while these guys who have been out there busting our ass for the city for years, they turn their back on us.”

McKinney said he guessed the difference between his current pay and the living wage mandated by the city’s ordinance is the difference between having $15 of discretionary income each week and $100. It would mean he wouldn’t have to worry whether he had busfare to get to work in the morning.

Receiving a living wage is also a matter of pride. “At least they’d be acknowledging that we’re doing the same work as the full-times,” McKinney said. “Also it’s giving us the option of getting some kind of medical coverage.”

Two members of Common Council—North District Councilmember Mike LoCurto and South District Councilmember Mickey Kearns—have consistently called on the city to live up to the living wage law, and both were present at Tuesday night’s vigil. The rest of the Common Council has been, let’s say, circumspect in their embrace of the law. One elected city official, speaking anonymously, agreed with the mayor’s assertion that the law was financially untenable—he said there wasn’t enough money to pay a living wage to all covered city employees. (LoCurto, speaking at the rally, noted that the city had found money to give a raise to Strategic Planning czar Tim Wanamaker; the city had been prepared to purchase new SUVs for commissioners at the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority until the News raised a stink; the city has apparently found money to hire a new commissioner in charge of ethics, in the wake of the Public Works scandal that led to Actining Commissioner Dan Kreuz’s demotion and then firing. “Don’t feel too bad,” LoCurto said, about the demonstrators failure to speak to the mayor that day. “We can’t get in the mayor’s office either.”)

The city official said that the city’s municipal unions gave lip service in public to a living wage for all city workers, but in private negotiations were interested only in their own contracts. They were happy to leave the city’s less well represented workers out in the cold while scrambling for the city’s limited funds.

The ordinance may be difficult to implement, but it has the force of law: If the mayor and the majority of the Common Council think it’s unreasonable, then they must summon the political will to change it. They can’t simply ignore it.

Tim Johnson has an explanation for why city bureaucrats and elected officials don’t push harder for the living wage law to be enforced. “I know some of the nephews and cousins of those councilmembers, they’re bringing them onboard and they’re kicking them up to full-time while they’re leaving these guys behind,” Johnson said, nodding at McKinney. “Of course they’re not saying anything: They’re taking care of their families. But we can’t take care of our families on $8.15 an hour.”

On Wednesday, some of the protesters who had spent the night in Niagara Square sat in on a CitiStat meeting that the mayor was attending. They intercepted him afterward and asked him to respond to the letter he’d received. Brown expressed his support for the living wage; he said he’d been given a bad rap in the press. He promised he’d sit down for a meeting with concerned parties soon.

Alison Duwe of the Coalition for Economic Justice, which organized the protests of Tuesday and Wednesday, said a promise to meet wasn’t enough. Brown has promised meetings in the past year—with CEJ, with the Living Wage Commission—and failed to follow through.

—geoff kelly