- Finally, Republicans introduce bill to stop Obama’s overtime edict [SHRM, Connor Wolf, Veronique de Rugy] “Congress realizes new overtime rules stink” at least as applied to themselves [Suzanne Lucas, Evil HR Lady, earlier] Knowing whether you’re in FLSA compliance can be tricky enough to fool HR specialists [Eric Meyer]
- “German army forced to lay down weapons due to ‘overtime limits'” [Telegraph, U.K.]
- “Minimum Wage Hike Kills Popular Upstate NY Eatery” [Legal Insurrection] “Please don’t be the reason the future of our farm ends here and now” [WENY, upstate New York]
- “How raising the minimum wage hurts disabled workers” [Naomi Schaefer Riley, Philanthropy Daily] Maryland moves to end exception that allowed workshop programs for the disabled to pay subminimum wages, and if clients sit at home as a result, at least they’ll have their rights on [Capital News Service]
- Proposed D.C. ordinance restricting “predictive scheduling” of employee hours would snarl retail and restaurant operations [E. Faye Williams, Huff Post]
- “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense,” said Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown, and then proceeded to sign the bill [Scott Shackford, Reason] “UC Berkeley Touts $15 Minimum Wage Law, Then Fires Hundreds Of Workers After It Passes” [Investors Business Daily]
Filed under: California, disabled rights, Germany, Jerry Brown, minimum wage, New York state, wage and hour suits, Washington D.C.
15 Comments
Why don’t UC Berkeley administrators take a pay cut to protect jobs?
Because it wouldn’t protect most of the jobs. It’s not just a matter of total budget. Each job needs to be evaluated on the value that individual job brings vs the cost. Raise the minimum wage too high and some jobs aren’t worth the cost of having them done at all.
Has congress actually done anything productive in the last 4 years?
Sequester
Killed an upstate eatery??
Since the wage hike has NOT gone into effect yet one has to wonder what the real reason is.
Guess they should have mandated larger labor budgets for all organizations public and private in order to pay the higher minimum wage. Ooops.
Like I tell my children, a higher minimum wage only helps you if you keep your hours and your job, but it certainly doesn’t help me that the floor is 43% closer.
Minimum wage is supposed to suck in order to stimulate those who need it to do better. It’s not supposed to be “good enough” or anything else which leads to complacency. It’s a starting point, not a place to stay.
Oh yeah, and hire the handicapped, they’re fun to watch and really cheap.
Ian, that’s not how it works. My sister feels the Bern. But when she went to sell her house she didn’t look around for a single parent from an oppressed group to sell to at an affordable price. She asked for all she could get.
The minimum wage was invented by the early progressives for the purpose of pushing “inferior” races and disabled workers right out of the job market; they never said exactly what they wanted to happen to those people, but dependence on charity and a slow death by privation was the only result that could be expected. Now there’s welfare, but the progressive agenda is still to raise the minimum wage and push the inferior right out of the job market.
This is, like other liberal policies, a result of Republicans refusing to budge. If conservatives would have agreed to index the minimum wage to inflation years ago, we would not have the $15 movement today. There are other policies that are very similar, e.g,, the exemption from overtime. Similarly, if Republicans would work to fix Obamacare, we would have a better product that would be less objectionable.
But the Republican party remains intransigent. On the one hand, sticking to your guns is a good thing. On the other hand, it increases the chance of shooting yourself in the foot.
In other words, If the Republicans would just do what the Democrats want, everything would be fine.
The Republicans would shoot themselves in the foot IF they monkeyed with Obamacare, a poorly conceived and executed disaster that, as of this moment, has no Republican fingerprints on it. Not yet, anyway.
Mike. When the ACA passed, there were 60 Democrats in the Senate. Republicans had no chance to stop it. Had the Republicans wanted, they could have put in some things that would have made it more palatable. That is what happened with the Social Security Act, i.e., conservatives abhorred it and won some significant victories in limiting its scope. I think one might look at it as damage control.
Conservatives should feel grateful that the Democrats did not do in 2009 and 2010 what Republicans have done with their supermajorities in places such as Kansas and Wisconsin. If they had, the arguments over the ACA would be the least of the Republcans’ worries. One might argue that doing so would have been political suicide. But with the Republican takeover of the Senate and House, it is hard to figure out how much worse it could have gotten (I guess Obama could have lost in 2012, but that would have been the absolute worst).
I disagree with the notion that Republicans have any duty to make a thing they abhor more palatable.
Conservatives did not abhor the principles underlying the Affordable Care Act until Obama espoused them. It was a conservative theory to begin with. The liberal/progressive theory was and still is single payer. Obama trashed the single payer option in order to try to placate the conservatives.
The Republican position has consistently to oppose any Obama plan, regardless of its merits or its conservative basis. That is not an insane position, given the 1990s, when Clinton adopted conservative positions, got them passed, and bolstered the Democrat party. McConnell and crew did not want to give Obama the chance to employ trianglization and have a rehash of the 1990s. And I guess we should be glad of that, because the Republican strategy in gave us an electable W in 2000, non-cooperation gave them Trump/Cruz. Not that the Democrats are dancing in the street with the prospect of Bill Clinton returning to the White House with no responsibilities.
“Conservatives did not abhor the principles underlying the Affordable Care Act until Obama espoused them.”
I do not believe that there is any point in our continuing to kick this particular ball back and forth. Your ability to read the minds of “conservatives” (are these the same people as “Republicans in Congress”?) places me at a clear disadvantage.
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