New York City's $15 Minimum Wage Is Now Officially A Disaster

in #economy5 years ago

Authored by Jake Dima via NationalInterest.org,

New York City’s $15 minimum wage, which began to take effect Dec. 31, 2018, was meant to bolster earnings and quality of life, but for a lot of residents, it’s doing the opposite...

Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation in 2016 to increase the New York York State’s minimum wage to $15.00/hr. The lowest minimum wage in NY at the time was $9.60. NYC’s “big employers” (11 or more employees) were the first to be forced to increase minimum wage pay toward the end of 2018. The rest of NYC’s smaller-scale businesses won’t have to pay up until December of 2019, according to data on Cuomo’s website.

Cuomo claims to have created the bill with “the needs of workers and businesses alike” in mind, but a lot of business owners in the boroughs beg to differ. They say the extra money comes with an unforeseen cost: higher good prices, fewer working hours and layoffs.

“Many people working in the restaurant industry wanted to work overtime hours, but due to the increase, many restaurants have cut back or totally eliminated any overtime work,” Andrew Riggie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, told Fox News.

“There’s only so much consumers are willing to pay for a burger or a bowl of pasta.”

Roughly 77 percent of NYC restaurants have slashed employee hours. Thirty-six percent said they had to layoff employees and 90 percent had to increase prices following the minimum wage hike, according to a NYC Hospitality Alliance survey taken just one month after the bill took effect.

Only about 4 percent of survey respondents indicated that none of the above changes took place in their restaurants.

“What it really forces you to do is make sure that nobody works more than 40 hours,” Susannah Koteen, owner of Lido Restaurant in Harlem, told Fox News.

“You can only cut back so many people before the service starts to suffer.”

NYC restaurants are taking hits from Cuomo’s push, but Washington doesn’t seem to have received the memo. The House passed the Raise The Wage Act in July, which mandated a nation-wide $15 minimum wage. The bill was later blocked by the Senate.

The bill would have effectively doubled the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr. There is dismal 6 percent support for a nation-wide $15 wage hike among economists, according to Fox News surveys.

Cuomo’s office did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation by the time of publishing.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-10/new-york-citys-15-minimum-wage-now-officially-disaster

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Vastly over-rewarded for a complete copy/paste job.

I feel your slice of the reward pie is too large 1.jpg

Reminds me of when they forced the unaffordable care act, pushing businesses to provide health care for full time employees, what did they do? Slashed ours to make everyone part timers, nobody got to “keep” their doctors and most just paid the penalty and did without ANY insurance. Now here we are again, with anothe Bonehead idea, only this actually only helps the BIG corporations like Walmart, they can take the hit, but it forces mom and pops shops out of business.... it’s why big corporations are supporting it.

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Who could have seen this coming!! WHHHHOOOOO!?!?

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Who would have thought that hey? meaning well is always supposed to work out lol! can't governments just let people agree their own terms for running their lives and businesses? seems so weird they want to play big brother in everything without ever understanding how things work. Why do we let people who never ran a business set policy for it?

While a higher wage sounds nice in idea, in practice theres a lot more to consider than just 'more money for employees'. Thats the main drawback of most attempts to bolster the living standard: businesses exist ultimately to make a profit and maximise said profit, and in order to do so they need to cut costs where possible. The wage hike definitely needs to be reconsidered, and while I'm not against it, the consequences need to be evaluated.

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