California is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s a very expensive place, too. When you’re at the bottom of the food chain, it can be close to impossible to survive here.

I’ve made it 15 years in California working in the food industry alongside other Latinos who struggle to stretch every single paycheck and still can’t cover the basics.

Now 59 years old, I’m an advocate at The Street Level Health Project, doing outreach with hundreds of day laborers who hope for just one more day of work to pay for one more day of food.

I know all too well what a single dollar can do to improve the living conditions of the people who keep California running.

That’s why I know that passing Proposition 32 and increasing the minimum wage to $18 over the next two years has the potential to change lives.

In the back of every restaurant, the days are long and the work is intense. I spent hours on my feet without breaks, lifting boxes, cooking and cleaning. Still, I had to take multiple shifts just to cover rent — and I certainly wasn’t the only one.

Many of my coworkers weren’t comfortable with the language, the technology and the systems required to navigate getting better jobs or advocating for themselves to improve the ones they had.

I’m lucky to have started learning English early in my life with the help of an aunt who worked for an English-speaking family in Mexico. But still I was never promoted to front-of-house work in my many years in the food service industry.

Like so many people, I was stuck, grateful for a job but not earning enough to move beyond survival as the costs of housing, food and gas kept rising.

Day laborers have it even harder. Every day in Oakland, I count between 200 and 300 people waiting for the opportunity to work. Our outreach team provides education about their rights, and on some corners workers have self-organized not to accept subpar wages. They are forced to choose between accepting less than they deserve and getting nothing at all.

They often don’t want to speak up because they don’t want to lose what little they have.

But I will: California’s workers deserve more.

Proposition 32 would increase the statewide minimum wage from $16 to $17 this year, and to $18 in 2025. Smaller businesses would get an extra year. Almost 40 cities in California already have wages set above the state minimum, so it’s beyond clear that the current minimum wage isn’t high enough. For a single adult to cover all the basics in California, MIT calculated that they’d have to make $27.32 an hour.

It’s an open secret that, in the system we live in, a great number of the people who will benefit most from this wage increase cannot vote for it themselves — they need other voices and votes to push Proposition 32 forward and help put a few more dollars in the pockets of every worker in the state.

And, it will give day laborers and other untraditional contract workers something to stand on to help advocate for more dignified pay.

Proposition 32 is an important step toward a thriving and sustainable California for everyone.

Victor Moreno is the day laborer employment advocate for the Street Level Health Project. He wrote this column for CalMatters.