City Will Let Voters Decide on $12.25 Minimum Wage Hike

Councilmen in Oakland, Calif., rejected an increase in the city’s minimum wage, opting instead to let residents vote in November on a plan to hike the rate from $9 per hour to $12.25.

The proposal the city council rejected last week  was drafted as a business-friendly alternative to the more aggressive initiative pushed by the Lift Up Oakland Coalition.

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Business owners said the initiative will make them less competitive and hurt the people it is supposed to help.

“It’s not going to lift anyone up when businesses have to close and no one has a job,” Amy Roither-Quintero, a local restaurant owner, told reporters.

John Latchford, CEO of Goodwill Industries, fears the wage increase will hamstring his charity’s youth job program, which subsidizes employment for at-risk youth.

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In a letter to the council, Latchford warned a minimum wage increase “would mean that fewer people would have access to paid training … since we would need to cut significantly that number of paid training hours.”

James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics  at The Heritage Foundation, agreed. He said the proposed minimum wage would “saw off the bottom rung” of many inexperienced workers’ career ladders.

“Two-thirds of minimum-wage workers earn a raise within a year,” Sherk said, “but they have a hard time getting that raise if they can’t land an entry-level job to begin with.”

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Gary Jimenez isn’t buying that argument, though. The president of Lift Up Oakland Coalition explained that “we got to get people out of poverty, and the only way to do that is to address the issue of income inequality.”