How To Kill Hotel Jobs In L.A.
Last week, members of the Los Angeles City Council voted to increase the minimum wage for hotel workers within the city to $15.37 per hour by next year. Why? You'd have to ask them.
A study they commissioned me to do on the subject — then seemingly ignored — raised serious questions about the wisdom of the measure.
Months ago, the City Council asked three analysts to look at the proposed wage hike. One was decidedly pro-labor, one decidedly pro-business. My firm, Beacon Economics, was the third, selected with the approval of both business and labor groups. We had no preconceived ideas about the proposal; we merely agreed to analyze the available data and see if conclusions could be drawn.
But the City Council never seemed interested in really examining the potential economic consequences of the ordinance. We got our instructions about what questions to address just two weeks before the vote, and we were surprised to learn that the council intended to vote on the day after we turned in our final analysis, which suggests none of the members spent time looking at our findings.
That's unfortunate, because the results strongly suggest that such a steep increase in the minimum wage could result in a sharp decline in the number of jobs in the hotel industry. And that kind of job loss could mean that as many workers would be hurt by the law as would be helped by higher wages.
Read the full story: www.latimes.com
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