That didn’t take long: Just hours after news broke of the state Senate’s wacky new bipartisan governing plan, New Yorkers got a whiff of one of its top priorities: killing 22,000 jobs.
Democratic Sen. Jeff Klein — who is to run the Senate jointly with Republican Sen. Dean Skelos — doesn’t admit that that’s his goal, of course.
But Klein did say that the new arrangement means the Senate is now certain to hike New York’s minimum wage. And that’s just as certain to kill the jobs.
Or so says a report released almost the same time, published by the National Federation of Independent Business, a small-business advocacy group.
On Wednesday, we wondered if the Senate’s odd new power-sharing setup could even work. Now, it seems, New Yorkers might have reason to hope it doesn’t.
Democrats have been seeking a 17% hike in the minimum wage, to $8.50 from $7.25, for a while. Skelos and his fellow Republicans, who’ve controlled the Senate for the past two years, have blocked it.
But as Klein notes, under joint leadership, a hike is now likely. Gov. Cuomo, who’s pushed for the increase, even says he’ll judge the Senate’s performance based, in part, on whether it ups the rate.
Yet on Tuesday, the NFIB painted a sobering picture of what such a hike would do: Besides killing 22,000 jobs, some $2.5 billion in economic output would vaporize.
“Raising the minimum wage,” said Mike Durant, the NFIB’s New York director, “will affect the smallest businesses that can least afford higher labor costs, and they’ll respond by finding ways to reduce or limit the number of jobs they create.”
Depending on inflation, the group says, costs for entry-level workers would soar by as much as 66% by 2022 — “more than many small businesses can handle.”
Some 70% of the lost jobs would come from small businesses, the very engine of job creation.
Why would lawmakers want to kill jobs?
They claim they’re trying to help low-paid workers. But destroying job opportunities doesn’t sound to us like it would do them much good at all.
(Then again, it might please unions, whose members already have jobs, and which traditionally view minimum-wage hikes as a means of bumping up wages across the board.)
Meanwhile, passage of a job-killing wage hike might be a sign of things to come under the new Senate arrangement.
Hmm.
Chaos, paralysis and dysfunction in Albany are starting to look better and better every day.
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A Job-Killing Coalition
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A Job-Killing Coalition
