Calif. lawmakers focus on labor laws
By Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times
SACRAMENTO — Big issues in the workplace — wages, overtime, time off, working conditions — are also major topics in the state Legislature. And this year, lawmakers delivered some tangible changes that will be felt in the pocketbook.
At the top of the list, of course, is an increase in the minimum wage that swept through Democrat-dominated Sacramento, despite opposition from powerful business interests. But workers didn’t get all of their agenda passed into law.
“We were able to improve upon existing protections as well as support workers in a number of new ways, including increasing the minimum wage,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation. “If you look at this year, compared to over the past decade, it would be hard to argue that there’s been a better year for worker legislation.”
Many of the latest changes, Smith said, might seem incremental. But all are important, he explained, because “the cumulative effect is to make it harder for employers to violate the rights of workers, which is a good thing.”
So if you flood CA with legal and illegal immigrants that tend to suppress wages because of over supply, all you have to do is mandate a very high minimum wage by law and presto give every worker a large pay increase. Insanity at
its finest. We will all pay for this I want your vote scheme by the socialists and anti-capitalists. BTW, the extremely rich like Gates and Zuckerberg want all the cheap scientists and engineers (read foreigners) they can get, while Americans technology graduates can’t find a job.
They raised the pay for the lowest wage earners and for themselves. Nice.
They actually think they deserve a raise while they destroy the middle class in their state, raise taxes on those who can least afford to pay them, and discuss purchasing high tech cars for the poor while the rest of us have to keep coaxing our 10 years old jalopies along. The law makers don’t worry about such things; most of them drive state cars that they fill with state supplied fuel, and when they are in Sacramento making these earth shaking decisions, they stay in the finest hotels on the tax-payer dime as well. Most of their paychecks they get to pocket. They live expense account lives while deciding the fates of those who pay the tab.
How much longer before the people wake up?