Amazing, isn't it, how little leftist politicians know about economics, especially where minimum wage laws are concerned. The minimum wage, of course, has been and always will be zero, no matter the good intentions of anyone who thinks they can simply mandate otherwise.
Case in point: Los Angeles, where the city council and Mayor Karen Bass, currently in contention with New York's Zohran Mamdani for "America's Most Clueless Mayor," have passed an ordinance that will jack up the minimum wage for workers in the hospitality industry to $30 an hour. As you might predict, that means a lot of working-class people in that industry are now looking at unemployment.
A phased-in minimum wage hike in Los Angeles that will mandate up to $30 per hour for hotel workers, signed into law by mayor Karen Bass, is already causing problems for the hotel industry and putting the squeeze on the working-class demographic that minimum wage laws are purportedly intended to help.
"The bottom line is the city of Los Angeles has forced a wage and benefits package on hotels that is utterly unaffordable at a time when Californians and Americans are laser focused on affordability," Hotel Association of Los Angeles (HALA) President Dr. Jackie Filla told Fox News Digital in an interview this week.
HALA recently commissioned a study that found hotels have eliminated or expect to eliminate 6% of positions, roughly 650 jobs, since the Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance took effect in September 2025.
These won't be the last. Note that the top-out wage of $30/hour hasn't yet taken effect. That may well be the last straw.
It gets worse.
"We are at the very beginning of the series of these increases and hundreds of hotel workers have already lost their jobs," Filla said. "Even more are seeing their hours reduced. We've seen restaurant closures within hotels, parking is already getting more expensive, and improvements and the creation of new buildings altogether are being delayed or canceled. So taken together, these impacts should really sound alarm bells for our local policymakers."
Everything will get more expensive. This is already an area where many of these people can't afford to live anywhere near their workplace. Now, Mayor Bass and the City of Los Angeles are resolving that problem by making sure they don't have a workplace. That's leftist logic for you.
Read More: Karen Bass's Pothole Photo Op Backfires Spectacularly As Reporter Humiliates Her on Live TV
Look, labor, like any commodity, product, or service, is subject to the law of supply and demand. If an employee does not return to their employer values in excess of their cost of employment, that employee won't be employed any more. That's Economics 101, and clearly Karen Bass was asleep in the janitorial supply closet when that part of the class was covered.
All of these blue cities seem determined to drive every business, every corporation, every employer, out of their jurisdictions. It's inexplicable. The politicians and the people who vote them into office seem incapable of learning - as my grandfather used to say, "You can teach 'em, but you can't learn 'em." Can this be changed? I know several good people, economically literate people, conservative people, who live in California and in the LA area. There are many people with roots in these cities. Home is home, after all. And maybe, this year, the Democrats will have screwed up Los Angeles and California enough to give the grownups a shot at fixing things.
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