Walmart Store Closing Over $15 Hour Minimum Wage

Fight for Fifteen Dooms Chinatown Wal-Mart

What the unions could not do, the city government finally did accomplish. Starting January 1st, the minimum wage in Los Angeles rose to $10 per hour, and by 2018 it will be $15 per hour. That may seem like a brilliant move to city politicians, but the laws of economics are still in effect, and Wal-Mart is not a charity. Inner city stores cost more to run, due to higher insurance costs, theft loss, and other variables, and the employees are often less experienced or trained. In January, 2016, Wal-Mart announced the Chinatown store would be one of 154 in the U.S. that would be closing, and the city residents are the ones that will be losing the most. Government pols think that they can make decrees and the public must obey, in this case, the anti-business climate in Los Angeles and the pending rise of the minimum wage to  $15 made the store a liability to be jettisoned.

After succeeding in pushing through a minimum wage that was set to start on January 1 at $10 an hour and jump in steps to $15 in 2018, unions and liberals have begun to panic that spiking wages might actually cause the 15 percent rate of unemployment among those with a high school diploma or less to rise.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s most recent in-depth analysis on minimum wage hikes estimated that President Obama’s proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $10 an hour would raise wages for 16 to 24 million people, but would also kill 500,000 existing jobs.

Liberals piously called this negative impact a “reasonable tradeoff worth embracing,” whereas conservatives and business owners called it proof that risky government interference would destroy jobs and put more people on welfare. But there are no independent studies of what a 50 percent, let alone 100 percent increase would do.

Furthermore, Walmart’s closure in Los Angeles means that shoppers will still be able to go to neighboring cities to shop at Walmart, taking sales tax payments away from LA.

The autocratic union push to demand $15 per hour for entry level work seems like a good idea for economic morons, but businesses are already starting to find ways to automate those jobs to eliminate the cost and problems that new, inexperienced workers bring, and the first jobs that many of us had such as box boy or fast food worker could well disappear in the near future as businesses seek ways to avoid an unsupportable labor cost.

As for the unions, their only growth area is in the public sector which has rigged the game. In the private sector, union membership fell to only 6.6 percent in 2015, a new low and down from 40 percent in 1960. And a pending lawsuit now before the Supreme Court challenging the right of unions to force membership on public school teachers will be heard soon. If the court agrees and other public sector workers exit union membership it could mean serious trouble for government unions, which have also shown themselves to be completely out of touch with the economic realities in today’s economy.

For now, consumers and workers will be the ones most seriously hurt by the idiocy of the unions protesting the lone Wal-Mart in Chinatown and the absurd demand by local politicians for a minimum wage that is completely irrational for new workers in the city of Los Angeles.

Source: breitbart.com