SAN JOSE — San Jose’s lowest paid workers will see their hourly pay jump from $10.50 to $12 starting Saturday, but the Bay Area’s largest city has fallen behind several of its neighbors in the rush to raise minimum wages in one of the nation’s most expensive places to live.

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‘Keep that torch burning’: San Jose’s Scott Myers-Lipton inspires unprecedented social change San Jose was at the forefront of the move to raise minimum wages five years ago with the approval of a ballot measure that raised the pay floor from what was then the statewide minimum of $8 to $10. But since then, other cities have zoomed past San Jose in giving low-wage earners a boost — and many will get to the nation-leading goal of $15 per hour much quicker.

San Francisco’s $13 minimum wage will rise to $14 this weekend and hit $15 by next year, making it one of the highest in the country. Mountain View and Sunnyvale both reached a $13 minimum wage in January and also will hit $15 next year.

Oakland in January raised its minimum wage 31 cents, from $12.55 to $12.86 per hour, and it will continue to rise annually based on the local consumer price index.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo in 2015 called for a regional approach to raising the pay floor. San Jose and several other Bay Area cities — Palo Alto, Cupertino, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Monte Sereno — have agreed to a $15 per hour minimum wage by 2019.

“We wanted to reach $15 earlier and, yes, we’ll be there one year later,” said San Jose State Professor Scott Myers-Lipton, who crafted the successful 2012 measure to increase San Jose’s minimum hourly wage by $2. “But we got a lot of what we wanted — a clean $15, where there wouldn’t be exemptions that were pushed by the business community.”

Liccardo had suggested studying exemptions from the higher wage for “hard-to-employ” people such as parolees, homeless and foster youth — but those carve-outs weren’t ultimately approved.

Scott Knies, executive director of the San Jose Downtown Association, said his group opposed the 2012 increase because San Jose was at the forefront and business leaders worried it put them at a competitive disadvantage.

“It was controversial at the time because we didn’t want to be the only ones,” Knies said. “You could go across the street on Bascom to Campbell and get the same burrito for a dollar less.”

But Knies said the 2012 minimum wage increase “barely made a ripple” and local businesses absorbed it well. And now that South Bay cities are much more equalized, it puts San Jose on similar footing with most of its neighbors.

“Without a state mandate that puts everyone on the same level, you’re always going to have some cities ahead and others lagging,” he said. “But it’s much better than it was five years ago.”

California’s statewide minimum wage, currently $10.50, is scheduled to reach $15 by 2022.

Still, concerns of job loss and increased labor costs linger in the business community. A recent study by the University of Washington found Seattle’s wage hike actually hurt minimum-wage earners and the loss of work hours cost them an average $125 a month.

But Myers-Lipton said those effects weren’t felt here — he said government data showed 4,000 new minimum wage jobs were added and 10,000 new businesses opened in the two years following the passage of the 2012 measure. Knies agreed that the effect was minimal.

San Jose’s minimum wage hike could impact 115,000 workers, a UC Berkeley study found.

Angelo Heropoulos, owner of the Opa Management Group, runs five restaurants in San Jose. He said it’s unclear how many of his employees will be impacted by Saturday’s increase, but said he won’t need to raise prices.

“We’re losing a ton of people because they can’t afford to live here. I definitely agree that people in Silicon Valley need to make more money,” said Heropoulos, but added that employees who earn tips should be excluded. “When you have a waiter who is being tipped, they’re already making the elevated salary — the legislation is one-size-fits-all and leaves no room for that.”

Ben Field, executive director of the South Bay Labor Council, says restaurant employees are some of the “lowest paid workers” in the economy and it makes no sense to leave them out.

“There is no public policy justification for keeping wages of tipped workers in restaurants lower than the standard minimum wage,” Field said. “The tips that restaurant workers make are not sufficient to get them to the level where they are getting by. They’re still struggling.”