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The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday voted 14-1 to support creating a citywide minimum wage, which will rise from the current statewide minimum of $9 an hour today to $15 an hour over the next five years.

A third of California’s employed workers are “low-wage” and their ranks are growing, according to a new study from the Center for Labor Research and Education at University of California’s Berkeley campus..

According to the Teamsters, the job action this week delayed the movement of goods for major retailers because most terminals did not accept trucks from the four companies.

U.S. labor costs accelerated in early 2015, a sign that the job market may be tightening and beginning to generate a long-awaited pickup in workers’ wages.

If dockworkers honor those lines, the flow of goods could grind to a halt. However, when dockworkers stopped work during previous trucker strikes, they were quickly ordered back by an arbitrator.

Key issues in the strike include Teamsters’ contention that drivers should be classified as full-fledged employees of trucking firms and the union’s allegation that drivers are not receiving the full amounts of wages they are owed.

One of the state’s largest and most active health care unions — SEIU United Healthcare Workers West — submitted an initiative on Monday to boost California’s statewide minimum wage to $15 an hour by the year 2021.

The analysis, which compared 2014 city and federal wage data, shows that three of the five largest job categories represented by Service Employees International Union Local 721 — the biggest and most prominent of the unions now in contract talks with the city — pay more than double the median salary of similar full-time, private-sector jobs in Los Angeles County.

The supervisors agreed to weigh the impact of not only requiring a higher baseline pay for their roughly 100,000 employees — the largest local government workforce in the United States — but also for county contractors and businesses in those unincorporated areas.

There is now widespread agreement across the political spectrum that wage stagnation is the country’s key economic challenge. As EPI has documented for nearly three decades, wages for the vast majority of American workers have stagnated or declined since 1979 (Bivens et al. 2014). This is despite real GDP growth of 149 percent and net productivity growth of 64 percent over this period. In short, the potential has existed for adequate, widespread wage growth over the last three-and-a-half decades, but these economic gains have not trickled down to the vast majority.

Overtime for California’s state workers rose 20 percent last year and topped $1 billion even though there are 20,000 fewer employees than in pre-recession 2008, the last time the state paid out so much, according to new payroll data.

As Los Angeles officials await a study on the economic impact of a pair of proposals to raise the minimum wage, both business and labor groups have weighed in with their own studies.

During the third quarter that ended in September, average weekly wages in Santa Clara County hit $2,012 — more than double the national average of $949 a week, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports in a newly released study.

Although DeMaio and Reed belong to different political parties, they both believe pension obligations are siphoning money from local governments’ core services. As city officials in 2012, both backed successful local ballot measures intended to curtail public-pension costs. About two-thirds of voters in San Diego and San Jose approved the proposals. Unions immediately challenged their legality.

The way Levine sees it, California is becoming a “barbell economy” with relatively heavy job growth in high- and low-wage occupations while the middle gets squeezed. . . Levine contends California has become too expensive for employers to hire middle-wage workers. A lot of the blame for those high costs, he said, can be placed on the state environmental laws and other regulations that make California a more expensive state for doing business.