Hundreds of employees at UC Berkeley received a difficult lesson on economics, losing their jobs just one week after California enacted a $15 minimum wage that the university heavily promoted.
Professional protesters on the left can’t seem to grasp that a $15 minimum wage isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when it causes you to drop to a rate of $0/hour.
Via Investor’s Business Daily:
Hundreds of employees at the University of California at Berkeley are getting schooled in basic economics, as the $15 minimum wage just cost them their jobs. Too bad liberal elites “fighting for $15” don’t get it.
A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut.
Coincidence? Not really.
Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law.Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.
Following that announcement, Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley center told the Los Angeles Times that “This is a very big deal for low-wage workers in California, for their families and for their children.”
I would imagine that it is as big a deal for those families and their children now that they’ve gone from being low-wage workers to no-wage workers.
Just last month, economists at the university made the outrageous claim that raising New York State’s minimum wage to $15 would improve the living standards of more than 3 million people.
Aside from the fact that the UC Berkeley economists could have studied the effects of a $15 minimum wage a little closer to home, reports out of New York have actually claimed that the increase would cost the Empire State hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Even more recently, the minimum wage has decimated already struggling chains such as Sears and Kmart, which have announced the closing of dozens of stores.
Comment: Does the $15 minimum wage help or hurt businesses, and did UC Berkeley reap what they had sown? Share your thoughts below.
