New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani forcefully defended his call for a $30 minimum wage during the final debate of the race Wednesday night, warning that under the status quo, the expensive metropolis is at growing risk of becoming “a museum of where working-class people used to be able to live.”
The inability of many New Yorkers to make a livable wage in the city, Mamdani said, “is pushing them to live in Jersey City, to live in Pennsylvania, to live in Connecticut, because they can’t afford to live in New York City.”
Under Mamdani’s proposal, which would have to be approved by lawmakers, New York City’s wage floor would rise incrementally before reaching $30 an hour by 2030. The minimum wage would then be tied to either cost-of-living increases or worker productivity jumps.
It has an impact; not a substantial one. Of course businesses will complain. They don’t want to pay workers at all, let alone fairly, but the only real impact is a slight reduction in profits once.
We can argue on what you consider “substantial” to me. We can also both just walk away and whack it to Sailor Moon hentai. The latter might actually be a more productive use of time. Err, also let it be known I am referring to Queen Serenity or whatever since I just remembered most of the sailor scouts are teenagers and that makes this joke real fucked up.
The fact of the matter is that, yes, it does have an impact on businesses. Moreso small businesses than the megacorps.
Like… it is generally common knowledge that most restaurants fail in the first year and a large part of that comes down to wages and profit margins. Ignoring the hell that is tip based economies for the moment (they still factor in to a minimum wage increase but at a much lower rate), wages come out of revenue. Revenue is based on price per meal. If wages increase, you either pay out fewer hours or raise prices.
Which… does get to the tipping side of things. EVERYONE fucking hates tipping (except for the workers who work it). But the people arguing that we should just bake that into the price are quite often the same ones arguing that everything is getting so expensive. Like… no shit?
Because, at some point (essentially microeconomics at a scale where it sort of works), you can’t raise prices AND you aren’t selling more hot dogs. Same with trying to run a hardware store that has to compete with Amazon and Lowes. And you very much CAN see that over time where minimum wage goes up (good!) and you have more and more restaraunts and local hardware stores with fewer and fewer staff. We all hate the idea of waiting 5 minutes for someone to come make a key but… that someone was busy mixing paint and searching the stock room for that color of doorknob someone needed.
Which, again, is why I am a firm believer that the goal needs to be UBI and we need to decouple work with life. It obviously needs fine tuning so that there will actually still be people willing to do those deeply shit jobs but we also need a way that isn’t just a constant cost of living loop.
Look, I’m not going to deal with all that gish gallop nonsense. I’m just going to say that there is no proof of a causative relationship between higher minimum wage and any particular business failing.
Well, thanks for being honest, I guess?
You’ve done Duane Gish proud.