When Sacramento voters go to the polls next year, they may find four competing minimum-wage proposals to choose from. All of them would raise the wage to an hourly $15 before tying it to inflation.
The proposed initiative, supported by the Service Employees International Union’s state council, would boost the base wage to $15 per hour by 2020, and mandate six paid sick days a year. The current $9-an-hour minimum wage is scheduled to increase to $10 on Jan. 1.
U.S. employers, slow to reward workers with higher pay, have been quicker in recent years to offer signing bonuses, more paid time off and other perks.
You look at where you can afford to open restaurants. We have one restaurant in Seattle, and we probably won’t be expanding there. That’s true of San Francisco and Los Angeles, too. One of the unintended consequences of rising minimum wages is youth unemployment. Almost 40% of our team members are under age 21. When you start paying $15 an hour, are you going to take a chance on a 17-year-old who’s never had a job before when you can find someone with more experience? . . . We are testing server hand-held devices for order-taking in 30 restaurants now, and we’ll roll them out to another 30 in the next month and another 30 by the end of the year. Servers like it because they can take on more tables and earn more tips. Eventually we’ll have tablets where guests can place their own order from the table and pay for it.
Reich has a different vision: that government should mandate that all employers offer higher wages, and that people who can’t find jobs at those wages should be denied the chance to work. But creating a permanent underclass of people who can never get the skills for a meaningful career is not moral; it is cruel.
A large California union is seed funding an organization aimed at accelerating such campaigns around the country, seizing on growing public support for raising the minimum wage to heights that just one cycle ago would have seemed like total fantasy.
David Miller, the president of the scientists’ union, notes that annual raises last year to his members’ managers averaged $42,000 to comply with a like-pay for like-work court ruling. Rank-and-file scientists thought they’d be next. The bargained agreement didn’t come close.
An initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2021 has enough signatures to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, according to a press release from SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, which is sponsoring the measure.
On Wednesday, Wal-Mart stunned Wall Street by forecasting that its earnings would decline by as much as 12 percent in its next fiscal year to January 2017 as it struggles to offset rising costs from increases in the wages of its hourly-paid staff, improvements in its stores, and investments to grow online sales. This at a time when it faces relentless price competition from Amazon.com Inc , dollar stores and regional supermarket chains. Keeping the prices it pays suppliers as low as it can is essential if it is to start to claw back some of this cost hit to its margins.
The nation’s biggest employer blames its recently released lower forecast on a plan it unveiled in February to hike minimum hourly compensation to $10, up from $7.25 at the federal level.
So we’ve raised standards and lost such jobs. In effect, we’ve decided such jobs aren’t worth keeping.
Even if a $15 an hour minimum wage risks job losses, it is still the right thing to do.
Wal-Mart’s second profit warning in two months should be a wake-up call for the political left. If America’s largest private employer is struggling with its own pay increases, how will other businesses cope with even larger minimum-wage hikes?
The bill, known as SB 588, was sponsored by state Senator Kevin de León of Los Angeles. It would allow California’s labor commissioner to place a lien on the property of an employer cited for wage theft.
Los Angeles City Hall union leaders are celebrating a major victory in their fight with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti over who should pay for health care costs.
The same is not true for social welfare programs, such as Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance, which can impose significant financial penalties on recipients who are married, according to new research from the R Street Institute, a Washington think tank.