Posted on 05/19/2015 7:57:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Los Angeles lawmakers are expected to vote Tuesday on a hotly debated plan to hike the minimum wage across the city to at least $15 an hour.
If they press forward with that plan, the city could soon join Seattle, San Francisco and other West Coast cities that have boosted wages as part of a national campaign led by labor and community groups to reduce poverty, even as business groups argue the strategy will backfire as employers slash jobs.
Workers are currently supposed to earn at least the California state minimum wage of $9 an hour, which will rise to $10 an hour in January. Under a plan endorsed by a key panel of City Council members last week, Los Angeles would increase its required wage year-by-year to reach a minimum of $15 hourly by July 2020.
Small businesses -- those with 25 workers or fewer -- would get an additional year to phase in the increases. Nonprofits that meet certain requirements could ask permission to do the same.
Under the plan, the wage requirements would continue to rise automatically every year starting in July 2022, based on the average increase in the consumer price index over the previous two decades.
The wage proposal would hike pay more slowly than some activists wanted. But leaders in the Raise the Wage Coalition nonetheless heralded it last week as a sound plan to improve the standard of living for low-income workers and their families.
Business groups such as the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. remain worried the hikes would hurt the economy and have been especially critical of the automatic, future pay increases as a threat to businesses.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
$15/hour—work will pay... if you can find a job!
Why not make it $1500 or $15000 per hour? Economic illiterates.
I’ll raise you $150,000 ( I got plenty of numbers :)
We shut down all but 4 vocational colleges, shipped mfg jobs offshore withth NAFTA, now we’ll shut down small biz to make ourselves feel good.
Do it! I double dog dare you stupid jackasses to do it! Why stop there? Make it $100.00 per hour. Why be stingy?
Do it you fools! The Quicker the better!
Enjoy your 10 hour work week!
I watch businesses roll up due to ObamaCare, then another wave for $9 an hour, with announced plans for a December shutdown to avoid $10 an hour and paid sick leave.
Fancy jeans are about to get a whole lot more expensive.
Seriously. Some sane lawmaker should insist on $1500/hour, or it is a “no” vote. After all, it’s about “the poor,” isn’t it?
And then call them “hater 1%-ers” if they disagree.
“I’ll raise you $150,000 ( I got plenty of numbers :)”
“It maka no difference to me......I got lotsa numbers! “
Chico Marx
It’s a states rights thing if they wan to raise it to 15/hr let them.
Prepare for automation to a degree never before seen.
The work ethic shall NEVER be nourished, if the apprenticeship is priced out of the market. But people being what they are, they may fall into self-teaching, developing and honing skills that may not yet have a value in the marketplace, and these skills may well prove to totally undermine the whole superstructure of nonsense that has built up on fuzzy assumptions and wrong-headed compassion.
Computer hacking, well-developed as it already is, may actually only be in its infancy. As the possibility of a self-aware artificial intelligence grows ever less remote, the inclination to tap into and take control of this superior computing and logic-directed capability will also increase exponentially, and the question is, who will get to it first?
The total organization of a bee hive or ant hill is seen as “efficient” by many of the philosophers who have observed these things, but there is a critical element lacking. That is widespread adaptability when the routine of the hive or hill is disrupted, and the usual emergency responses are insufficient.
Freezing in a critical element of the progression to wider adaptability also freezes further innovation. This further stratifies the complex social order that once had the flexibility for even the most unpromising to rise to great heights, and rewards merit without denying advancement to another younger advancing generation.
$15 of 2014 dollars would be worth $2.00 in 1965
I guess they figured there weren’t enough out of work in LA! So what happens when all costs go up proportionately to the wage increase, as they must? Better yet, what happens when the workers find out how much their taxes go up and they get kicked into a more expensive health care situation. I have seen this with much lower increases and my employees shock when reality hit.
Hell A, California
California should raise the minimum wage to $20 and increase welfare benefits to those who cannot find jobs to the equivalent of at least $15 an hour plus EBT and housing et al. At the same time in California ALL water should be put off limits to human use so long as the fish are deemed to not have enough to drink. Raising cattle should be banned in the interests of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and the Imperial Valley should be returned to its natural condition.
Do these people really not understand how a mandated minimum wage effects a market?
The first and most obvious effect is that it eliminates the original jobs that employed workers worth the original wage. Those workers are now unemployed, and there are NO jobs, by law, that pay the little the workers are worth. Thank you, Government. They are permanently out of work.
The second effect is that the work that was being done will likely no longer be done by any person. Dishwasher? Now it is a machine, or they’ll use paper plates, or they’ll close the business. Waiter? Now they’ll use counter service. Cook? Now they use self service microwaves. Or they’ll simply close the business.
The real effect, and the one that is hardest to see, is that a minimum wage reduces the standard of living of every person, and does not benefit any person. It is like giving everyone a tranquilizer, or killing every tenth person, or breaking thumbs at random. It does no one good.
The solution is, if you pay more taxes than you receive in benefits, you vote, and if you receive more benefits than you pay in taxes, you do not vote.
Or we watch our children get killed, raped, and starved.
Go for it! It works every time! Suddenly home sales sky rocket, vacation hot spots like The Bahamas, Bermuda, the Virgin Islands benefit! Rolls Royce, Mercedes, BMW prosper and custom tailors increase business 10 fold!! ~s
BUT FIRST make it illegal for businesses to leave. And then, wall the state in so liberal Californians can’t infest other states by voting for this same crap.
I am not too far from Seattle so i get their news. There was much fanfare when they enacted the $15 wage. A few weeks later there were the lamentations of eager shop keepers who were crying that they can’t afford the new wages. EVEN THOUGH they were 100% for it. They just didn’t expect that they would have to pay for it.
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