The State of New York just passed two significant measures. One is a new family leave policy and the other is a new minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Liberals are pretty stoked about both items. Smaller businesses, particularly in hard-hit upstate NY, not so much. Expect the people intended to benefit — lower wage workers in marginal industries — to be hardest hit because there will be fewer jobs. Entry level positions, where many people get their start, will be harder to come by.
New York Mag reports:
New York Just Created a Revolutionary New Family-Leave PolicyYou say you want a revolution? A political, social, economic policy upheaval that will dramatically alter the playing field for millions of Americans by significantly reducing economic and gender inequality?Don’t look to the presidential campaign. Look closer to home.On the last day of March, the New York State Legislature finalized a budget deal that included not only a promise to raise the minimum wage to $15, but also the nation’s newest — and by far its strongest and most comprehensive — bill mandating paid-family-leave time for most employees.That means that New York has just become the fifth state — after California, which passed its family-leave insurance program in 2002 and implemented it in 2004, New Jersey (2009), Rhode Island (2014), and Washington (which passed its measure in 2007 but has not yet put it into effect) — to mandate paid leave. And compared to its progressive predecessors, New York’s bill is startlingly robust.
There’s much more in this Memeorandum thread.
Here’s a video report from CBS News. If you watch to the end, you’ll see that there are some people who are concerned, namely small business owners, also known as job creators:
Seattle was one of the first places to raise the minimum wage to $15. Let’s see how things are going there.
Mitch Hall of The Federalist:
70 Tries After Seattle Raised Its Minimum Wage, I Still Can’t Find A JobMy opposition to minimum wage increases comes as a direct result of my own experience searching for jobs as a new resident of Seattle, Washington, a city that currently has one of the highest minimum wages in the nation. In June 2014, the Seattle City Council, composed of just nine members, unanimously voted to increase the city’s base pay to a whopping $15 an hour, to be gradually implemented over the course of several years…In December, I found myself needing a break from college, for a variety of reasons. So at the close of last semester, I decided (rather impulsively, as young people are wont to do) to take my spring semester off from the College of William and Mary and move out west to try my luck in Seattle, a place I had only visited once before…Having a combined two years of serving experience and close to five years of total experience in the customer and food services industries (which is literally as much as you can ask for from a 20-year-old college student), I assumed I’d be able to find a restaurant gig in no time. So, after reassuring my parents all would be well in the financial department, I boarded a plane in Philly a few weeks later and made the move.Yet seven weeks and more than 70 job applications later, I still have yet to land a part-time, minimum wage job. I’ve spent the majority of the last two months stalking online job sites and entire days traversing the various neighborhoods of Seattle, filling out applications and inquiring about job opportunities at any restaurant, coffee shop, retail store, or other service-oriented establishment I can find.
Coming soon to a city near you?
Featured image via YouTube.
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