I'd like Disney to pay generously. Any self-proclaimed premium service provider should.
But as soon as the term "living wage" enters the discussion, things fall apart. It's a nearly impossible thing to define and implement without hurting just as many people as it supposedly helps.
Not to nerd out too much about this, but economists actually have standardized ways of defining the living wage, and it certainly is not the case that living wages hurt as many people as they help. The living wage is
usually defined as twice the local cost of basic goods and services with a tax rate adjustment. This is very easy to calculate from data that the federal government collects routinely, so it's not especially difficult to estimate in theory or practice. There are public tools that can do it for you, or it's not hard to write your own and make changes as you see fit.
I can only assume that your comment about it hurting people is based on the idea that a cost of living increase is inflationary. In fact, the economic evidence does not show this to be the case. Living wages either have no or limited impact on inflation. This is because inflation results from changes to the aggregate supply and demand curves, not movement along those curves. To understand the exact impact that a living wage will have on inflation, you need to account for details like the marginal propensity to consume, as well as the impact of other government and private sector policies.
Leaving aside those details, it just isn't the case that the US is doing things particularly well. The idea that raising the minimum wage to account for the cost of living will do widespread macroeconomic harm just isn't plausible given how poorly the US does as compared to other wealthy economies. If these sorts of policies were going to hurt more people than they help, countries where these policies are the norm would not be outperforming the US. We can and should do better.
To me, the wage paid should match the needs of the employer and what the employee can offer. For example, this summer, Cedar Point's starting wage was $20 per hour, and returning employees got more, plus bonuses after working so many days. All the employee had to do in most cases is to have a good attitude and be willing to learn. Supply and demand.
Off topic, at AGW and off to DtD to have Thanksgiving Dinner Ice Cream.
This kind of reasoning can work if labor markets are efficient and well functioning. They're not. That means we can't apply basic high school level cartoon pictures of how hiring works to understand wages in the real world. The overall result is that wages are higher than they should be in some parts of the labor market, and especially in service industry jobs, much lower.
Not that long ago, this is exactly how it worked. Someone who had a family to support was paid more than someone who only had themselves to support. It was considered the moral thing to do and no one questioned it. But somewhere along the way, we as a society decided that was unfair and discriminatory and mandated that everyone be paid the same. And what happened? Now everyone gets paid the same crap wages. Victory!
This is a bit strange given that wage stagnation is more than 50 years old. It's not caused by social changes, but by structural changes in labor markets, like concentration of employers and globalization.
Okay, enough politics/economic theory. This ruling is a shame, but it does seem to be a correct reading of the law. If this mainly acts as a deterrent on Disney accepting future corporate subsidies, that seems like a weird and unintended outcome of the ballot measure.
www.hollywoodreporter.com
www.latimes.com
saltandstraw.com
runsignup.com
