Con: Minimum wage increase for California workers

Raising the minimum wage won’t be good for all of us here in Los Angeles, while Mayor Eric Garcetti is pushing his plan to raise the wage to $13.25 by 2017.

While the increase in minimum wage might sound fascinating at first, we have to look more into it and see how it will affect us. The current plan from Mayor Garcetti needs to be improved dramatically, so that it works out for everyone.

The proposed plan is to raise the minimum wage from $9 to $10.25 in 2015, to $11.75 in 2016 and $13.25 in 2017. Yes, everyone likes to get paid more and this plan has the minimum wage going up every year for the next 3 years, but it will not be worth it in the end.

The increase in wage will rise and so will everything else with it. Businesses, small or large will have to change radically. Major companies will be able to afford the change and give their employees a higher wage, while smaller companies won’t be able to do the same and will struggle. Small businesses have very little chance of surviving, because they will have to pay their employees more and to do that they would have to increase their prices on their products to be able to afford workers.

Prices on food, clothing, transportation, etc. must go up to pay all the employees. Small businesses will need to start laying people off when they can’t afford to keep them. Instead of making more jobs, this plan will cause us to also lose jobs.

Major companies’ willpower to survive will have them figure out a way to keep paying their workers while creating new jobs , but they would have to give less hours to all their part time employees. At $13.25 an hour, working 25 hours or less, it is hard to live with especially if you have a family to feed.

At first it didn’t sound that bad to raise the wage in Los Angeles. Looking forward this plan to increase it up to $13.25 in 2017, by Mayor Garcetti will affect employees and all businesses. The plan needs a lot of work before it can go through or we will see drastic changes by small and large businesses.

While your pay check might look bigger, so will the prices of everything  we buy.