The $15 minimum wage campaign continues its march across the country. The Los Angeles City Council Tuesday adopted a $15 minimum, phased in over several years.
Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same.
Familiar names appear in the coverage.
“The effects here will be the biggest by far,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was commissioned by city leaders to conduct several studies on the potential effects of a minimum-wage increase.
Reich was one of the economists who conducted research for Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s minimum wage committee.
Backers of a $15 minimum wage for Tacoma turned in signatures Monday. The Pierce County Auditor says the verification process will be completed by May 27.
The initiative may not be the only minimum wage proposal on the ballot.
The $15 minimum wage issue could share the ballot with a competing measure blessed by the Tacoma City Council. Mayor Marilyn Strickland and the City Council created a task force to examine how to change the city’s minimum wage after the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber asked her to create a group to study alternatives.
According to the proposed ballot measure, businesses making gross revenues of $300,000 per year or more would have to pay a $15 minimum wage with no phase-in period or exceptions based on a business’s number of employees.
You have to credit the 15 Now Tacoma folks. With the threat of a radical ballot initiative, they’ve forced the capitalist running dogs of Tacoma — i.e., the City Council and Chamber of Commerce — to scramble for an alternative that will undoubtedly involve raising the minimum wage in the city…The initiative, if passed, would move the current $9.47-an-hour minimum to $15 as soon as the measure is certified at the beginning of 2016. Were that to happen, Tacoma would be immortalized as a textbook case of utopian economics run amok.
…hundreds of the city’s small employers could no longer do business as usual. Some would fold; some would move to Lakewood, University Place or Fife; some would reduce hours, lay off employees or cut benefits to comply with the initiative…
A lot of workers would wind up with $0.00 an hour, which is what you earn when you have no job.
According to data from the Council for Community and Economic Research, it costs workers about 40 percent more to live in Los Angeles than in the average American community. That means that $15 in LA is the equivalent of less than $11 in the U.S. overall.
In addition to the absolute costs of these measures, and the challenge they create in competing with other employers not subject to the same mandates, local governments’ wage and benefit regulations create compliance problems for employers operating in multiple jurisdictions…Research is mixed on the effects of incremental increases in the minimum wage, but large increases are clearly associated with declining job opportunities for the young and unskilled.
