San Diego’s 10News is reporting that a campaign to repeal an expected rise in the minimum wage is being organized by the San Diego Small Business Coalition. (I urge you to “like” their Facebook page.)
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer vetoed the measure, but the San Diego City Council is expected to override it. If that happens, Jason Roe, spokesman for the San Diego Small Business Coalition, says he has already begun to fundraise and has “substantial commitments from small businesses.”
Roe says the group is ready to launch a ballot drive to repeal the hike. Some 34,000 signatures must be gathered in a month to get it on the ballot in June 2016.
Meanwhile Council President Todd Gloria is already asking people not to sign the expected petition. Pretty clear that the referendum fight is game on. The petition is a great idea that I will support by getting signatures and making donations.
If the minimum wage hike stands, it is going to be a nightmare to have a different wage in San Diego than in neighboring communities. Enforcement will be tough. How will the City Attorney collect records from out of town businesses? Further, such a measure erodes the competitive edge of San Diego businesses at the margins. The minimum wage hike will only hurt the working poor and punish businesses. All the energy expended on an issue that only helps a very small 2% of the workforce is all the proof I need that something foul is afoot. Minimum wage hikes are a back door way for unions to get wage concessions without bothering to bargain or strike. When some thug tries to stop me from gathering signatures on my petition, I guarantee that they will have been paid by a union.
UPDATE – From the U-T:
The San Diego City Council voted Monday to override Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s veto of gradual increases in the local minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2017, starting the clock on a referendum campaign that business leaders have said they’ll pursue.
If opponents can collect the 34,000 valid signatures required for a referendum by Sept. 17, the wage increases will be held in abeyance pending an election in June 2016.
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What You Should Be Reading
- The supposed death of the Tea Party has been greatly exaggerated.
- Meanwhile the left is pinning their hopes of defeating Carl DeMaio’s challenge to Scott Peters by tying Carl to the Tea Party. (I guess its not good enough to actually be LGBT to get support from that community, you have to be the right kind of LGBT.)
- The VOSD fact checks claims and counter-claims in the Peters-DeMaio race regarding Peters’ role in the pension scandal. While they take DeMaio’s claims to task, they also note that Peters’ did not in fact solve the problem. His involvement in the pension mess is surely a liability that no amount of left-leaning fact checking will wash away. To be fair, I like a lot of the VOSD reporting, despite their clear bias.
- Having a tough time blogging, research getting tough? Consider hiring a virtual assistant (VA) for $5 per hour. Wait, will the city attorney come looking for me if my VA is in India, but I benefit from the work? (Seriously, I have considered this, as the research and editing is slowing down my writing.)
Wouldn’t you rather be doing internet research for me?
Public domain image of 1903 Chicago “sweatshop” workers.
Comments 6
I hope it makes it to the ballot and I will gladly vote against an increase.
However I am ready to support their wage increase IF council Democrats are ready to support the repeal of all arbitrary business licensing fees, zoning fees, land use fees, and business tax late fees.
That would force council Democrats to prove that they support minimum wage workers and small business over a destructive revenue source for the city.
Of course they won’t support that. They’ll support government revenue streams every time.
Union Buster,
Let’s go even farther:
Why don’t we eliminate ALL business fees and taxes, including TOT? If this won’t make us business friendly enough, let’s cut the City’s sales tax in half. The reduction in government revenue will give us an opportunity to eliminate all (over-paid and under-worked) public employees except for police and fire and we can even reduce firefighter compensation by at least 40% if needed to balance the budget. After all, there are always hundreds of applicants for every firefighting position.
Sounds like a Richard Rider Utopia. what do you think?
Union Buster, don’t even try to explain logical business sense to Hypocrisy. He probably doesn’t even care that small businesses gave San Diego a D rating in friendliness to small business. The San Diego Democrats treat all businesses as enemies except for the crony capitalist ones like GE and Costco that give them a lot of money. When I was running for the District 2 City Council seat, I met and talked with Todd Gloria for 45 minutes. He spent most of that time talking about how the poor people deserve more money and that small businesses had plenty of money to pay them. When I explained how I wanted to help poor working people in a different way by creating more and better paying jobs in David Alvarez’s district and Myrtle Cole’s district, he ignored this idea and went right back to his pitch about giving poor people more money they didn’t earn. The San Diego City Council needs to learn that it can not legislate prosperity. You want to help the working poor make more money? Get them job training, like dental hygene training for example, so they learn the skills that will make them more money.
Dan,
I am not familiar with where you got that D rating from, but I do know that Forbes rated San Diego as the #1 city to start a business.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tompost/2014/03/13/the-best-places-to-launch-a-startup-in-2014/
Let me share what they said:
“1. San Diego, CA
Small enterprises ranked in the top five on nearly every category to lift San Diego into the top slot. There is heavy concentration in projected high growth industries, as well as a high likelihood of accepting credit cards and adopting social media. San Diego is home to the fifth-best rated business community in the country.”
Hypocrisy: The Kaufman Foundation survey of small San Diego business owners gave San Diego an F for friendliness and an F for starting a small business http://www.thumbtack.com/ca/san-diego/#/2014/1.
As a personal survey sample, I am friends with Santiago, the owner of Donut Bar, a new, very successful small business in Downtown San Diego. He says the taxes, fees, and regulations by the state are horrible to begin with, and San Diego piles on the misery in a big way. He strongly disagrees that San Diego is friendly to small businesses. Next door is Old Gallery Coffee Shop. The owner Hector says the same thing. In talks I had with Ahmed, the owner of Midway Express Auto Wash, he is scathing in his condemnation of San Diego business taxes, fees, and regulations. Don’t believe me? Go and ask them yourself. Also, ask Brian Brady, and Eric Andersen, both small business owners.
By the way, when I met with Todd Gloria, he told me that there was NO support from small businesses he talked with for the Minimum Wage but he didn’t believe them.
Dan,
I hope that you are not simply dismissing the report from Forbes; last time I checked they are a very respected business publication. That said, I am not discounting the fact that many business owners (small, medium and large) wish there were less regulations and less taxes. I think many non-business owners feel the same way.
The problems with surveys and anecdotal stories is that their results will always be all over the map. This can be due to differing methodologies, bias of the authors or simply who is paying for the survey. Fortunately when it comes to raising the minimum wage, we don’t need competing opinions, we have quite a few case studies.
So here is my challenge to you: Show me a city, county or state whose economy tanked or who saw an exodus of businesses after they raised the minimum wage. Better yet, tell me what happened in this Country every time the federal minimum wage was increased.
Opinions are great, but neither one of us will convince the other that theirs is better. Facts, on the other hand, are tough to refute. Start your research with San Francisco, Seattle and Sante Fe.