Unions beg out of Los Angeles minimum wage increase they helped to pass

The same labor unions that pushed for an increase in the minimum wage in Los Angeles are hoping they don’t actually have to pay the increased rate, now that their wish has come true.

Union leaders asked the Los Angeles City Council for an exemption to the newly approved increase, which is slated to graduate the minimum wage in the city to $15 per hour over between now and 2020.

From Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times:

The push to include an exception to the mandated wage increase for companies that let their employees collectively bargain was the latest unexpected detour as the city nears approval of its landmark legislation to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020.

For much of the past eight months, labor activists have argued against special considerations for business owners, such as restaurateurs, who said they would have trouble complying with the mandated pay increase.

One key union advocate positively sounded like a Republican lawmaker from a right-to-work state in explaining the logic behind the labor leaders’ request.

“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both,” Rusty Hicks, who heads the L.A. County Federation of Labor, said in a statement. “The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them. This provision gives the parties the option, the freedom, to negotiate that agreement. And that is a good thing.”

That’s only one small logical step away from just flat-out saying that the only thing standing in the way of such unbridled freedom as Hicks describes is … being hamstrung by attachment to a collective bargaining group.

Change his statement from “employees” to “employee” and you get the picture.

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