Amazing, isn’t it, how little leftist politicians know about economics, especially where minimum wage laws are concerned. The minimum wage, of course, has been and always will be zero, no matter the good intentions of anyone who thinks they can simply mandate otherwise.
Case in point: Los Angeles, where the city council and Mayor Karen Bass, currently in contention with New York’s Zohran Mamdani for “America’s Most Clueless Mayor,” have passed an ordinance that will jack up the minimum wage for workers in the hospitality industry to $30 an hour. As you might predict, that means a lot of working-class people in that industry are now looking at unemployment.
A phased-in minimum wage hike in Los Angeles that will mandate up to $30 per hour for hotel workers, signed into law by mayor Karen Bass, is already causing problems for the hotel industry and putting the squeeze on the working-class demographic that minimum wage laws are purportedly intended to help.
“The bottom line is the city of Los Angeles has forced a wage and benefits package on hotels that is utterly unaffordable at a time when Californians and Americans are laser focused on affordability,” Hotel Association of Los Angeles (HALA) President Dr. Jackie Filla told Fox News Digital in an interview this week.
HALA recently commissioned a study that found hotels have eliminated or expect to eliminate 6% of positions, roughly 650 jobs, since the Hotel Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance took effect in September 2025.