(The Center Square) – The Los Angeles City Council’s delay on a $30-an-hour minimum wage has some groups shaking their heads and others clapping their hands.
The council last week voted to postpone implementation of the new minimum wage for hotel and airport workers. The vote was 9-6 and would move the timeline from 2028 to 2030.
The vote came amid pressure from businesses threatening efforts to repeal the city’s gross receipts tax, which is a major source of revenue for Los Angeles. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson has been quoted in various news reports as calling this a placeholder to keep talks going.
The Rev. Jennifer Gutierrez, executive director at the Clergy & Laity United For Economic Justice, said in a letter to council members that “hundreds of clergy and people of all faith traditions across Los Angeles condemn the horrific, cowardly vote.” Gutierrez also said that the council “caved.”
Another vote will be necessary to officially delay the wage.
Still, Rebekah Paxton, research director at the Employment Policies Institute, said the City Council was right to delay implementation.
“You don’t fix an affordability crisis by mandating higher wages,” Paxton told The Center Square.
She recommended lawmakers focus on policies that increase earnings without consequences that result in fewer hours, fewer jobs and a higher cost of living nationwide.
“There are a lot of activists out there pushing sort of the emotional case for raising minimum wages,” Paxton said. “However, a lot of times we see something like this comes into place, and then there are studies done on the impacts after the fact that don’t look good, that show economists are right, and these things generally reap negative consequences for workers and businesses.”
EPI has just released a survey of 166 economists on a range of minimum wage issues. The survey found that 96% of respondents oppose a minimum wage of $20/hour or higher. Ninety percent oppose wage laws up to $20 per hour, and 75% do not want a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Even so, Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, said people cannot make it in America today without higher wages.
“One Fair Wage has been fighting to raise wages and end various sub-minimum wages for 25 years,” Jayaraman told The Center Square. “The new Living Wage for All Coalition is working to raise the minimum wage closer to the cost of living, per the MIT Living Wage calculator, which says there’s nowhere in the country where you need less than $25 [an hour] and there’s nowhere in California or New York where you need less than $30.”
Jayaraman said that there has “never been a time when year after year, cost of living has gone up so incredibly high.”
Jayaraman said workers simply cannot survive on wages that are less than the cost of living.
“Without that, they are home insecure, they cannot stay anywhere near the job, and so people are not being able to find people for less, or they’re working multiple jobs,” said Jayaraman. “You can only work so many jobs and get some level of sleep as a human.”
