Or, "Huge job surge about to hit Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona".
They'll get out just in time to avoid the Killer West Coast Earthquake, though, and get beachfront property as a bonus:
California legislators and labor unions have reached a tentative agreement that will take the State’s minimum wage from $10 to $15 an hour, a State senator said, a move that would make for the largest Statewide minimum in the nation by far.
“This is not a done deal,” Senator Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, told the Associated Press on Saturday. “Everyone’s been operating in good faith and we hope to get it through the Legislature.”
Leno said if an agreement is finalized, it would go before the Legislature as part of his minimum-wage bill that stalled last year.
About what, you may be wondering, could California Donks and Big Labor have possibly been negotiating when they both want the same thing? Simple - they each have minimum wage hike schemes that compete with the other's. Big Labor has not one, but two, count 'em, TWO ballot initiatives this November, while Senator Leno has his bill that accomplishes the same thing on essentially the same, but not identical, time table. Evidently the unions don't entirely trust Gollyfornia Jackasses to get the job done after Leno's bill stalled in the Legislature a year ago.
But, hey, this'll be economic Valhalla, right? Everybody - with a job - will have a "living wage", yes? Happy days are here again, and all that, correct?
No, not really, because there'll be a lot fewer jobs, because small and medium-sized businesses won't be able to afford nearly as many of them and still stay in business (aka "greed"):
“First, you have to raise prices, otherwise you’ll be out of business,” said [Selwyn] Yosslowitz, president of the Marmalade Café, which operates seven Southland restaurants and an outlet at LAX. Restaurant owners also have to think about “re-engineering the menu” to require fewer kitchen workers.
“We will try to re-engineer the labor force,” he said. “Maybe try to reduce the number of bus boys and ask servers to bus tables.” [emphases added]
If you raise everybody's costs, and nobody outside the private sector is allowed to print their own money supply, then everybody has to cut costs in other areas to offset the increase. Which means many fewer slightly better-paying jobs, less choice, more unemployment, more poverty, bigger government deficits, more government debt, and doubtless an effort to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Assuming, that is, the unions allow those cost-offsets in the collective bargaining process; and if they say no, then you can add "string of business failures and bankruptcies" and even more job losses to that list.
Oh, and by the way, the forced increase in labor costs won't just be for entry-level jobs, but all the way up the scale:
The other big worry: that employees already making $15 an hour, before the hike, will demand a raise as well, Yosslowitz said.
“It’s a chain reaction,” he said.
And you can hardly blame them. My wife would definitely land in that category, and when Washington goes down the same crazy train road, she'll get a hefty raise as well, which will be great....if she keeps her job. Which, all things considered, she probably would. But who knows for sure?
I'd better get a move on on that home money printing press. Nothing motivates like rapidly impending starvation, after all.
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