* The whole point of charter schools is to allow well-connected insiders to steal from American taxpayers. It would be racist to deny, to the Turks only, a boon given freely to any Saudi prince, Nigerian scammer, Russian oligarch, Chinese Red Army insider, Koch brother, or any other of the world’s sociopathic parasites.
* Let’s review Economics 101, for the sake of the legislators in California (and New York, which is likely to vote for the $15 minimum tomorrow):
-Higher wages will result in higher costs for employers.
-Higher costs will result in fewer employees hired, and an increased emphasis on mechanization and offshoring of jobs.
-Higher wages will also lead to higher prices.
-Higher prices will lead to a drop in product demand, which will also lead to layoffs.
-$15 an hour minimum will lead to a ripple effect throughout the wage chain, because the guy making $19 with five years’ seniority will demand a raise as well. This will contribute to the overall higher prices and reduced demand for goods and labor.
Now, add in the following: The federal Obamacare mandate requires that businesses offer health coverage to employees working 30 or more hours. SO, the MAXIMUM any $15 an hour minimum-wage employee will ever be allowed to work is 29 hours; therefore, his pay is effectively capped at 15×29 = $435; assuming he works 52 weeks a year with no time off, that’s $22,000 and change. Not exactly get-rich-quick wages.
In other words, we’re going to become France, where a 30-hour workweek, about $30k in disposable income, and 10-11% unemployment are the norm.
Perhaps that has been the plan of the Left all along…
* Private right of action (lawsuits, in other words) will fill in the gaps in California if public enforcement is lacking. There’s reasons you regularly see billboards for lawyers seeking wage and hour plaintiffs on buses, etc. A lot of these cases allow for class certification, kickback agreements aren’t legally enforceable (obviously), and wage, hour and working conditions lawsuits allow for recovery of attorney’s fees in California (a significant economic incentive for lawyers to find clients). Cal. Labor Code § 1194. Simply paying less than the minimum wage is a fairly easy thing to prove, relative to most employment law cases. Most wage & hour cases involve harder to prove claims like not giving meal and rest breaks, overtime, salaried employees, independent contractor vs. employee status, etc.
Cases like the Gulen cult, there are cultural and religious strictures that probably keep the followers from suing the imam, as well as probably threats of immigration consequences (they likely sponsor the visas). Illegals in California aren’t likely to face the same immigration consequences (they’re illegal anyway, and California state government won’t generally bother about that issue), and doubtful they’ll care enough about the crooked Persian business owner they were working for three years ago to forgo even a few hundred bucks as a class action claimant.
Granted, California’s court system is massively overloaded and a lot of dodgy employers can always declare bankruptcy or hide assets.
* Higher wages will drive out the riff raff to other states.
it’s what blue elites want.
many small businesses will move to texas and arizona.
and low wage workers seeking jobs will go there.
CA will turn more elite.
* As others have already commented the minimum wage law is one of those classic political oxymoron contradictions. Bring in cheap labor only to force small business to pay them a higher wage. Kinda like ban abortions, but execute murderers. And just like high cigarette taxes, it will encourage less then legal ways around it.
I myself like the guaranteed universal minimum income for all U.S. citizens, similar to what Charles Murray and Milton Friedman proposed. Let’s say at the national level $16K a year. You’d have to get rid of every welfare/needs based program, eliminate all tax breaks for poor, middle and rich earners to pay for it, but mathematically it appears it could be done.
Sure, many are going to band together to rent a house and sit on the sofa all day and smoke pot, but a percent of the population already does that. What I like about the concept is employer’s will have to come up with a wage that’s an incentive to get them off the couch and come to work. Think about it.
* One recurring theme here is how California’s big growth industry, cell phone software, often relies on using novel ideas to avoid regulations that increase the price of traditional industries (e.g. Uber avoids cities’ taxi regulations, Airbnb avoids hotel regulations).
I wonder what apps the tech geniuses will come up with to help California’s employers avoid paying their employees $15 per hour. Perhaps some sort of phone-based payroll business that classifies its clients as contractors not subject to minimum wages.
* I don’t see the problem. Employers just won’t hire anyone who can’t add value at a rate of at least $15/hr. If those folks are illegal, they need to go back from whence they came. If they are ours, they’ll have to live off of drug dealing, welfare, disability, etc. which is probably what they are already doing. Maybe we’ll once again see customer service staff that can actually speak English. Imagine that!
* It’s interesting to try to total up the various potential winners and losers of a policy like the minimum wage. My take is that a higher minimum wage works, in effect and broadly speaking, as an anti-immigration measure, hitting both the illegal low-wage worker as well as the gold chains small business crowd (though how powerful an anti-immigration measure it is I couldn’t say). Higher labor costs and wages in general tend to benefit, or at least hurt the least, capital-intensive and large economy-of-scale enterprises, which can make do with fewer workers and/or have higher gross revenues per worker.
Another hidden potential beneficiary, definitely relevant to California: Silicon Valley/IT/tech. Automation (or, looking at it another way, substitution of capital for labor) is always one answer to higher labor costs (and usually one consequence threatened by minimum wage critics: automation will replace jobs). Their low-skilled labor is off in China anyway.
California I think may be approaching an interesting economic and demographic tipping point in general. It’s getting more expensive to live here, with the costs of housing, water, and other basics going up. Gentrification is gaining ground in California cities, more steadily in Los Angeles and more quickly in the Bay Area. And now a wage hike may make it less attractive to either run a small business and staff it with illiterate paisas from Oaxaca. All of this means of course that the rest of America, as per usual, will be getting what California pioneered over the last 30 years while California maybe moves towards whatever’s next.
* Can any California readers let us know how the immigrant rights groups feel about this issue.
In the past many on the conservative side of the issue have argued that increasing the minimum wage might be effective in cutting down on the hiring of illegals since it would eliminate their wage advantage. They argued that an employer could feign ignorance that some worker’s SSN was fake, but that they cannot do the same with the minimum wage. Therefore their ability to cheat, (assuming the kickbacks you described don’t take place), would be greatly diminished and illegal labor would be priced the same as legal labor.
If this is indeed the case, then wouldn’t immigrant rights groups seek to oppose such a minimum wage hike knowing that it might curtail the immivasion and actually encourage some amigos to go home if they cannot get employment?
* SEIU and the other unions have gone broadly pro-immigration (including illegal) over the last few decades. Obviously they support the minimum wage, though not on immigration grounds. Mostly they’ve been looking for more workers to organize and more voters.
Two things:
First, there aren’t really “immigrant rights groups” of any particular influence, organization, or resources devoted to that singular issue. There are only more broadly leftist groups (like unions) and politicians that support it collaterally, as part of a broader agenda, and a handful of spokespeople and astroturf groups that are there for the media (and serve as props for the former).
Second, leftist thinking on either immigration (make that thinking on immigration in general) or the minimum wage never really gets that far as to thinking through consequences. It’s about feeling, rather than thinking. Higher minimum wage = good. Immigration = good. Good + good ≠ bad. That’s about as far as the thinking goes.
* You can’t have a high minwage and mass immigration at the same time, because the latter makes the former a dead letter. The only real way to raise wages is to rig the supply and demand curves in favor of labor, and by far the best ways to do that are restricting immigration and artificially restricting the rate of new labor supply in the legal domestic market, i.e. organized labor, aka labor unions.
