Once again, the main beneficiaries of this will be the union leaders themselves.
Unions in California pushing for a higher minimum wage say they care about workers, but it’s really a power play.
‘W e want California to be the first in the nation as it is in so many fronts, and to be able to spread this to other states,” Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union told the Wall Street Journal recently. Like so many other ideas from California progressives, let’s hope the spread is contained.
California governor Gavin Newsom is currently undecided on the $22 minimum-wage bill, but he is under heavy pressure to sign it. Unions are the main force applying that pressure. Never mind that California already has a $14 minimum wage, and it is set to rise to $15 next year. The state approved that way back in 2016. California did it at the urging of the labor movement, who said it was needed to ensure that fast-food workers could have a living wage. Sound familiar?
Unions have been a driving force behind the movement to raise the minimum wage. The SEIU launched a bid to organize fast-food workers in 2013 under the slogan “$15 and a union.” The intention was to plant the idea in franchise restaurant workers that if they organized, the resulting unions could negotiate a $15 wage for them. Why $15? “It was a firm round number that workers felt motivated and inspired by,” David Rolf, head of Seattle-based SEIU Local 775, told the Northwest Labor Press in April 2016.
It never caught on with fast-food workers for the simple reason that few people want to make a career out of working in that industry. But the idea of a $15 minimum wage did catch on with progressive West Coast politicians.
California was at the leading edge of this fad. “Economically, minimum wages may not make sense. But morally, socially, and politically they make every sense because it binds the community together to make sure parents can take care of their kids,” then-governor Jerry Brown said at the $15 minimum-wage bill’s signing.
Eight other states — including New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts — either now have $15 minimums or are set to have their wage floors rise to that within the next year. But the times they are a-changing, and $15 will apparently no longer cut it. So the unions are at it again.
Given that most of the fast-food industry still isn’t unionized, why are unions pushing for higher wages? A sky-high minimum wage eliminates the need for workers to have a union, since negotiating for higher wages is one of the main things that unions do. Aren’t unions shooting themselves in the foot?
The answer is that a high minimum wage raises the wage floor generally and that benefits already-existing unions. Fast food has long been seen as one of the lowest rungs in the private-sector employment ladder, so a union will argue during contract negotiations that its members are getting paid “only” X dollars more than fast-food workers make and therefore deserve a raise. If that contributes to higher consumer prices, well, that’s someone else’s problem, isn’t it? And if some businesses close completely because there’s no way they can operate paying wages as high as $22? Too bad.
There’s another reason unions push for a higher minimum wage: They see it as a potential stepping stone to European-style sectoral bargaining. That’s where one union is designated as the representative of all workers in a particular sector, regardless of what company a person works for or whether they want to join — which is basically what the California law does. The legislation also creates a ten-person panel to set hourly wages, and union officials would automatically get a spot on it.
Once again, the main beneficiaries of this will be the union leaders themselves. The workers would be better off if California took a stance that’s probably seen as quite radical in Sacramento: letting wages rise on their own without outside interference.