-By Warner Todd Huston
Once again wallowing in the hypocrisy that is liberalism, the same unions that went to the mat to support the new $15 per hour minimum wage law in Los Angeles are now demanding that the city exempt unionized companies from being forced to pay a minimum wage of $15 per hour.
The city’s union leaders were some of the loudest supporters of the new minimum wage, but now those same leaders are demanding that the L.A. City Council change the rules and exempt their own special interests from being stuck with the new wage.
Once again we see liberals insisting that everyone but them should be affected by a law they pushed.
Their excuse for the about face is that unionized businesses have already negotiated their deals and that they shouldn’t have to change them to observe the new wage law.
“With a collective bargaining agreement, a business owner and the employees negotiate an agreement that works for them both. The agreement allows each party to prioritize what is important to them,” Rusty Hicks, who heads the county Federation of Labor, said this week.
Even as he made this statement, Hicks is also one of the labor leaders helping to run the “Raise the Wage” coalition.
But some fear that this sudden and unexpected move by Big Labor is just a ploy to make unionizing even more attractive. If unions are all of a sudden exempt from the higher wage, some fear that businesses may actually warm to allowing unions to form thinking they’ll be saving money by avoiding the rate hike.
It would be a forlorn hope, of course, because even if they did get such a temporary reprieve from the minimum wage hike, unionizing will case far more business-crushing problems down the road than any temporary savings that might be realized.
Still, it is important to point out that unions are now trying to stand in the way of the very workers they have been advocating for getting that hourly wage hike!
The hypocrisy is thick.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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