Now that the Opportunity to Work Initiative has been placed on the November Ballot, I’d like to make a prediction. San Jose’s elected leaders are going to hear from outraged business owners who will argue the proposal will do them grievous harm. The source of their information will be the Chamber of Commerce, and the information will be a disgraceful pack of lies. Some might say, lying is to the Chamber as swimming is to a duck. It just comes naturally.
Since I’ve been involved in local government for nearly four decades, I have a solid historical perspective on this issue.
Back in 1998, Mayor Susan Hammer announced her intention to support a Living Wage policy in San Jose. A Living Wage program places restrictions on businesses that sign contracts to provide services to the city. Most businesses aren’t impacted by this kind of policy because they don’t sell services to municipal governments.
The Chamber of Commerce told local firms that the Living Wage was really a minimum wage that would be applied to every single business in the city. In consequence, the Mayor’s office received significant numbers of communications from businesses that did not now – and would not ever – sell services to city government. In many cases, they identified the source of their information as the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber’s position was an inexcusable and irresponsible lie.
Flash forward to the actual San Jose minimum wage campaign in 2012. Chamber leaders claimed in writing that more people would lose hours or lose jobs as a result of the higher wage than would receive the higher salary. There is no evidence whatsoever for this assertion, and anyone who can do arithmetic can see it is absurd (see example below this column). In short, it was a blatant lie.
Another whopper was the Chamber’s claim that the higher minimum wage would make consumers pay more for gas. The price of gas, of course, is determined by global market forces and California refinery capacity. The impact of a pay raise for the cashier at a service station is miniscule, and 75% of San Jose station attendants already earned $10 an hour. It was just one more Chamber lie.
Ok. I’ve made the case.
What can a Mayor or City Council member do about it?
Here’s what Mayor Hammer’s office did.
Every business person that wrote or e-mailed got a reply. Not a form letter. A personalized reply that explained accurately what the Living Wage would actually do. But there was more. The reply specifically told these business people that whoever had told them that the Living Wage was a minimum wage had deliberately misled them and urged the business people to go back to their source and demand to know why they had been lied to.
What happened? The complaints immediately began to taper off and then stopped.
Moral of the Story: Liars are usually cowards. They fear anyone who will stand up to them, and they fear the light of day.
Example:
A business has 10 employees and pays them $9.80/hour. The Minimum wage law requires they pay them 20 cents more or $10.00. The total additional cost per week for all employees is $80. Even in the unlikely event that the employer sought to recover ALL of those costs from cuts in hours, what would happen? If 4 workers lost 2.5 hours a week, that would cover more than the total costs. The Chamber argues 11 workers would have to lose hours or lose their jobs (more than the number than would benefit).
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