Supporters of raising Alameda County’s minimum wage to $30 gathered in the Glenview neighborhood of Oakland on Tuesday to celebrate collecting enough signatures to qualify the proposal for the November ballot.
It was all smiles at Blackberry Bistro as members of the Living Wage for All Coalition filled the restaurant, introducing themselves to one another and sharing stories over food and beverages supplied by the bistro while event organizers celebrated the work they had done.
The Living Wage for All Coalition is a national movement of more than 100 economic and racial justice organizations demanding a minimum wage that matches the actual cost of living, according to the organization’s website.
“Let us be the birthplace of a living wage for all, for everybody in the United States of America,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, a national coalition of restaurant owners and service workers advocating for higher wages in the service sector. “Workers all across this country are looking to what people are doing here in Alameda County and saying, if they can have 30 in Oakland, we want 30 in New York City and Chicago and Honolulu.”
To get placed on November’s ballot, the county will need to validate the signatures collected by the coalition, and then the measure will go to the Board of Supervisors. The supervisors can commission an independent report within 30 days about any impacts the measure may have and then decide whether to put it on the ballot or simply adopt the measure.
If the measure passes, it would raise the county’s minimum wage to $30 by July 1, 2037, then increase annually by 3%.
Currently, Alameda County does not have a countywide minimum wage, leaving it to cities to determine one or follow the state minimum wage of $16.90 an hour.
If passed, companies and corporations with more than 100 employees and revenue of more than $1 billion would be the first entities required to raise their minimum wage in 2030. Firms employing between 25 and 100 workers would have until 2035, while those with fewer than 25 employees would have until 2037, according to the measure’s language.
We know when people earn enough, they actually spend, and they support our businesses.
Zachary Norris, Black Organizing Project
Coalition member Zachary Norris, co-executive director of the Black Organizing Project, an Oakland-based grassroots organization that advocates for racial, social and economic justice, said the structure of the measure was designed to ensure small businesses had time to adjust while also ensuring those that can afford to pay higher wages would do so sooner.
“We know when people earn enough, they actually spend, and they support our businesses, and we need this to be the case,” said Norris. “That’s why we have businesses today, not only Blackberry Bistro, but also other local businesses coming out in support of this, and I think that’s going to continue.”
Business groups push back
Opposition to the measure appears to have already started. A website, stopgrocerytax.com, says the minimum wage measure would be a hidden tax on everything Oaklanders buy.
“The barbershop that’s been here for decades. They run on margins so thin that a near-doubling of labor costs isn’t something they can absorb — it’s something that shuts them down,” the website reads.
The website is operated by the Protect Oakland Families coalition and funded by the Americans for Opportunity SuperPAC, which is based in San Diego and was registered with the Federal Election Commission in March 2026. The PAC has supported numerous efforts against progressive politicians in Oakland, including recall websites targeting Mayor Barbara Lee and District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife.
Tanzil Chowdhury, an executive board member for United Auto Workers Local 4811, a Berkeley chapter of the national union representing 60,000 workers at the University of California, said local businesses would benefit from a higher minimum wage.
Chowdhury, who is also a researcher, said the coalition’s own economic analysis has shown that when people have more money to spend, they perform better at their jobs and spend that money in their local communities.
“I think that’s been borne out in community after community that has raised the minimum wage,” Chowdhury said. “That’s my message to the voters: We all stand to gain when we do this. It’s a rising tide.”
Tonisha Scott, manager at One Fair Wage, added that she believes the measure would help working-class people across the county. Scott said she became interested in the effort after seeing canvassers around Oakland and deciding to get involved in helping fellow residents who are barely scraping by.
“The wages here in Alameda County have been a problem for a while,” Scott said. “If you don’t worry about your electricity getting cut off, if you don’t worry about how you’re going to get to work next week, if you don’t have to worry about, ‘Am I going to have food for this week?’ … if you don’t have those worries, I think that increasing the minimum wage is something slight that can be done for people, for us folks who do worry.”
