This is really quite glorious as a display of sheer naked chutzpah. The labour unions have been, as one would expect them to have been, very strong supporters of the Fight for $15 movement, that group and campaign organising to impose a $15 an hour minimum wage around the country. And those labour unions also obviously supported the move to make the minimum wage that $15 an hour in Los Angeles. All of which makes complete and total sense even if the demand for $15 an hour itself does not. However, here comes the dropping of the other shoe. The unions are now insisting that that $15 an hour should not actually be the minimum wage in workplaces where unions are involved. Unionised shops should be allowed to set the wage lower than $15 if that's what they want to do. This could be described as chutzpah, as I have above. It could also be described as repulsively naked arrogance, your choice there.
The story is in the LA Times:
Labor leaders, who were among the strongest supporters of the citywide minimum wage increase approved last week by the Los Angeles City Council, are advocating last-minute changes to the law that could create an exemption for companies with unionized workforces.
The push to include an exception to the mandated wage increase for companies that let their employees collectively bargain was the latest unexpected detour as the city nears approval of its landmark legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.
The argument is, from the union side, as follows:
But Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor and helps lead the Raise the Wage coalition, said Tuesday night that companies with workers represented by unions should have leeway to negotiate a wage below that mandated by the law.
"With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them," Hicks said in a statement. "This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing."
It's difficult to know whether to giggle, guffaw or scream in rage at the arrogance of that. For a reasonable interpretation of that statement is that only if people are paying their union subs, those union subs that pay Rusty Hicks' wages, are they competent in knowing whether they'd like to negotiate their working conditions, wages and so on. For Randy really is saying that a union member can agree to go to work for $12 an hour, just as an example, but one not anointed with the healing touch of Randy's advice and aid is simply not competent to do so. For everyone else working at $14.99 an hour is a crime, one punishable on the employers' side, however voluntary and mutually agreed the arrangement is.
Another way of looking at it could be that this is simply a power grab by those unions. There's work that can and will be done if people are able to work, entirely voluntarily as tens of thousands do right now in LA, at wage rates of less than $15 an hour. If only union members are allowed to do this work then obviously employers willing to offer such wages and workers willing to accept them will all have to come to union agreements. A union agreement also meaning that Randy and his fellow union officials get to skim some portion of those wages as union dues. We might almost interpret this along the lines of "Nice business you've got here, be a shame if something happened to it, wouldn't it?"
Leaving aside such suspicions, which of course are most unkind as all of that sort of thing was entirely purged out of the American union movement decades ago, we still have that gobsmacking statement at the heart of it.
It's entirely possible, in fact not just likely to be but certain to be so, that certain groups of workers will come to the conclusion that not demanding $15 an hour will be in their best interests. This must be so or there would be no argument at all for such a loophole. So, we're demanding that the law make this illegal for everyone except those who join our club. A club they have to pay us money to join.
I don't know what you would call this , I know what I would and could and I also know that I'd never be allowed to publish my language covering it in a family publication like Forbes.
This is simply outrageous and the LA City Council must reject this and any other attempt at anything similar. Either a $15 an hour wage is necessary for all or it isn't. That it isn't, that it's an extremely bad idea is one thing. But the idea that union shops should have an exemption is that outrage.
