In an economy where bulldog corporations constantly squash the little man, it is imperative to preserve whatever small business culture we can hold onto.
Named the most small business friendly city in all of the greater Los Angeles area a few years ago, Long Beach would be making a big mistake raising minimum wage to over $15 an hour.
To all struggling families and fresh-faced high school and college students in the workforce, this seems like a blessing. Don’t be deceived. This will be fatal to the cultivation of small businesses we do have thriving in central and downtown Long Beach.
Mayor Robert Garcia’s office announced this summer that the city would be investing in a three-month, $65,000 research project to gauge the effect that potentially raising minimum wage would have on the economy. This study will decide whether it is feasible to follow L.A.’s plan to raise minimum wage to $15 in the next five years.
“Raising the minimum wage will allow me and my family to afford basic needs like rent, healthcare and food,” Lorna Palero, a caregiver in Long Beach said in a Raise the Wage coalition press release. “I am a single mother who is forced to work seven days a week to support my three children, because $10 an hour is not enough for us to survive.”
Raising minimum wage is definitely beneficial… to an extent. It proves that Long Beach does genuinely care about the people. According to the United States Census Bureau, over 20 percent of Long Beach residents live below the poverty line as of 2013, and close to 40 percent work just above that line. Putting more money in the people’s pockets and out of the corporate bank accounts. Excellent.
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But on the not so excellent side, small businesses won’t be able to afford this salary increase for employees without raising their product prices through the roof. Paying $5 for a small cup of specialty coffee is already pushing it. Even trendy yuppies have their breaking points.
It’s not just the small stores and companies that will raise their prices. Any businessperson worth his or her salt will increase prices in line with any additional money going into the pockets of consumers.
The L.A. County Economic Development Corporation analyzed the effect of the increased wage for the county and found that higher wages would almost definitely lead to higher prices and slower job growth, according to an article in the Press Telegram.
So, would all other jobs raise their pay scales respectively to maintain a hierarchy of skill levels or is my barista going to be earning the same wages as a skilled electrician who went to a technical school for two years?
I don’t care how good the coffee is.
Increasing minimum wage by nearly a third would be too much of a shock to our fragile economy. It would crush potential small business progress and mock those already at a $15 an hour salary.