Sunday, April 24, 2016

Lefty Logic:UC Berkeley Touts $15 Minimum Wage Law, Then Fires Hundreds Of Workers After It Becomes Active

A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut, reports Investor's Business Daily.

IBD continues:
Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law. Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.

Those workers might want to have a chat with the folks at UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research, who just days before Brown signed the wage-hike bill released a study touting the minimum wage as a boon to low-income household breadwinners.

After that report came out, Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley center, told the Los Angeles Times, “This is a very big deal for low-wage workers in California, for their families and for their children.”...
But why is anyone surprised about jobs cuts following a wage hike? It’s one of the most basic laws of economics. Any high school kid taking Econ 101 can explain it:  If you raise the price of something, demand goes down.

(HT Daniel McAdams)

3 comments:

  1. Ah, but a few will not get fired, will get paid more, and will stick around to vote for the politicians responsible. The rest were losers who should move to another state, anyway.

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  2. Audio engineers often use what's called a 'gate' to eliminate unwanted background noise. Any sound that doesn't reach a certain volume threshold gets dropped from the track. People think minimum wage laws act like an amplifier, making quiet sounds louder, but it really works like a gate: the quiet sounds get dropped.

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  3. It's probably a lot of jobs that college students held. I had a minimum wage job in the library where I went to school. No way they hire me or the other 3 or 4 students I worked with at $15 dollars an hour.

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