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Raising the minimum wage could cost Illinois' cash-strapped universities millions of dollars in added wages for their student workforce. With lawmakers warning of tough budget times in the fiscal year beginning July 1, the proposal to bump the wage from its current level of $8.25 an hour to $10 or more an hour is raising red flags among university officials. At SIU, for example, President Glenn Poshard said an increase could cost his institution $3.2 million in additional wages at a time when the General Assembly may be considering further cuts in aid to high education. "We need an increase...

Labor Unions look out for the average worker in roughly the same manner Michael Corleone looked out for his “business associates”. Apparently, in the city of Milwaukee, if you are a government contractor who requires your employees to pay Union dues to the Service Employees International Union, you don’t have to worry about complying with the city’s new “living wage” requirements. See, Unions care more about thuggishly extorting money from “the working man” than helping that same man make ends meet. According to the Washington Examiner:Milwaukee County officials approved a living wage requirement for local government contractors to pay at...

I see Pelosi and her lapdog media are going to push for more liberty to be destroyed by demanding a higher minimum wage. Doesn't she own wineries along with her husband?.. How much do they pay their grape pickers? When she took over as the Speaker of the House, I remember seeing a report that she is the RICHEST PERSON TO EVER hold that office. You don't hear much about that, do you?

**SNIP** The order will go into effect Jan. 1, 2015, and each new federal contract thereafter will have to comply with the new wage requirement. With that in mind, Mr. Perez said the number of contractors benefiting will rise over time. “Some will benefit year one. More will benefit year two. Even more will benefit year three,” he said, but added more calculations are necessary to determine how many workers will be affected. Also, the labor secretary insisted the order won’t bust budgets even though some federal contractors will be taking home bigger paychecks.

One day after Mayor de Blasio suggested New York City be allowed to set its own minimum wage, Gov. Cuomo shot down the idea as economically damaging to the entire state. Cuomo told a radio interviewer that having municipalities set their own, competing wage rates would create a “chaotic situation” and negatively “cannibalize” New York. The mayor needs Albany’s approval to increase the minimum wage, now set at $8 an hour.

**SNIP** The Bureau of Labor projects the majority of jobs developing to be low-wage service jobs. Is this the fault of the unemployed who are still out there looking for decent work, or is this the fault of big businesses who have greedily outsourced their production jobs for increased profit? There was an article a couple of years ago about Henry Ford. He paid his assembly line workers a $5 per day back in 1914 (that’s $118 in today’s dollars, according to MeasuringWorth.com). He did this because he wanted to increase productivity and reduce turnover — and if his employees...

The destructive consequences of Obama’s proposed Minimum Wage See: Obama to sign executive order raising minimum wage for federal contractors ”President Obama, in the first of potentially many executive actions tied to his State of the Union address, will unilaterally increase the minimum wage for workers under new federal contracts to $10.10 an hour, from $7.25, in an effort to build momentum for a minimum wage hike for all Americans.” And tell us Mr. President, how does the federal minimum wage affect our free market system, and in particularly, inner city youth who have dropped out of High School who...

Starting January 1, minimum wage workers in 13 states and four cities will see higher paychecks. While most of the increases amount to less than 15 cents per hour, workers in places like New Jersey, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island will see a bigger bump. Earlier this year, New Jersey residents voted to raise the state's minimum wage by $1 to $8.25 per hour. And lawmakers voted to hike the wage by between 25 cents and 75 cents per hour, to $8.70 in Connecticut and $8 in Rhode Island and New York. Residents in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana,...

Does Minimum Wage Create Jobs? The way to get higher pay is to increase your value to the job market. Every employee must bring more to the company than they take in pay and benefits. This is a requirement a company must meet to operate at a profit. The worker who wants higher pay and is willing to work for it must become more valuable to the company. He must become more of an asset or less of a liability. One way to become more valuable is to learn or improve in a trade or profession. Government controlled centrally...

Fifteen dollars an hour to say, "Would you like fries with that?" or "Welcome to Wal-Mart?" PLEASE. My very first position out of college in a terrible job market was as a Wal-Mart portrait studio photographer. Around the holidays, we'd have long lines; trying to get kids to smile after they've been waiting in Wal-Mart for two hours is no picnic. On my off days, I didn't dare pick up the phone because my district manager regularly called people and demanded that they fill in for employees who were sick in other locations. There was no chance of advancement because...

The White House has offered “no response” to a months-old call from congressional Democrats to bypass Congress and use executive action to raise workers’ wages, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus told Salon Tuesday afternoon. “It wasn’t responded to,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz. “I mean, the response would have been, ‘We’re working on it, we’re looking into it,’ ‘We feel it’s a good idea,’ or, ‘No, we’re not going to do it.’ Any of those is a response. We received none of that.” Grijalva pledged that, starting with a Thursday rally at the National Air and Space Museum,...

“The government is preparing for warming, which is outrageous.” Low sunspot activity means “the cooling will continue at least until 2030.” Last week, the IPCC reported it was 95 percent certain that climate change was the result of human activity, specifically the burning of fossil fuels that emit “greenhouse gases,” says this article on WND. “That’s the result that they get when you premeditate your science,” said Dr. Tim Ball, former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg. “The temperature is going down and has for 17 years while carbon dioxide increases,” Ball said. The IPCC and other scientists...

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Isaac Newton’s Law of Motion Washington DC Democrats passed a bill that would require retailers to pay workers at least $12.50 per hour. Within hours of the decision Wal-Mart announced it was canceling three store openings in the area. Nice work, Democrats. WTOP reported: The D.C. Council has passed a bill that would require large retailers like Wal-Mart to pay workers at least $12.50. The bill now goes to Mayor Vincent Gray for his consideration. The 8-5 vote was short of the votes needed to override a veto from the...

C. is really a tale of two cities in one. There are the touristy/wealthy neighborhoods and then there are, for want of a better term, slums. Wal-Mart has proposed to build three stores, one in the city's 5th Ward and two in the 7th Ward. These are two of the poorest areas in the city (pdf). The highest poverty rates in DC are found in an area largely made up of Wards 7 and 8. Nearly one in three residents in this area living below poverty in 2010, an increase of one-sixth since 2007. ... The largest jumps in poverty...

Let's work through an example. Suppose 100 yards of fence could be built using one of two techniques. You could hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each, or you could hire one high-skilled worker for $40. Either way, you get the same 100 yards of fence built. If you sought maximum profits, which production technique would you employ? I'm guessing that you'd hire one high-skilled worker and pay him $40 rather than hire three low-skilled workers for $15 each. Your labor costs would be $40 rather than $45. Suppose the high-skilled worker came into your office and demanded $55 a...

I am almost afraid to ask students (or my in-laws) what they think of President Obama’s State of the Union plea for raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00. I will ask my students this week, but not my in-laws (I already know their answer – YES!). The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the minimum wage and its impact on employment. While raising the minimum wage sounds “fair,” it is really grossly unfair. University of California at Irvine economist David Neumark has looked at more than 100 major academic studies on the minimum wage, and he...

Long Beach Best Western staff to be laid off as Measure N date nearsBy Kelsey Duckett Staff Writer Updated: 12/14/2012 06:50:37 PM PST Days before a ballot measure forcing pay and benefit requirements on Long Beach's largest hotels is set to go into effect, one hotel is cutting back on rooms and laying off workers. **SNIP** "This is devastating," Shelton said. "We really want to send a strong message to the hotel community that this is not OK. Hotels that don't abide by this pay increase are undermining democracy." Passing with 64.3 percent of the vote, according to the Los...

While watching the Huck Show I heard Nadar rant about this that and then he said something interesting. He wants minimum wage to be at 1960 levels.Nadar is a moonbat but I thought it was interesting. My calculation are that minimum wage would have to be $10.00/hour to match mid 1960's level.

Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R., Wis.) has a post on the Hill’s Congress Blog highlighting a bizarre new regulation from the EPA requiring some gas stations to sell at least four gallons of gasoline at a time. It affects those that pump both E10 and E15 (gas with 10 percent or 15 percent ethanol) through the same hose. Since E15 is pretty terrible for small engines and old cars (Sensenbrenner says it’s “like metal in a microwave for a small engine”), the theory is that when customers whose engines cannot handle it are buying gas,