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Opinion: Starbucks baristas who join a union may not get what they bargained for
April 2022 · Michael Saltsman · Detroit News
Your morning coffee at Starbucks could soon come with a union label. Employees at more than 200 Starbucks locations nationwide have filed petitions for union elections, seeking representation by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate Workers United. Associates at several stores have already opted to join the union. This burst of barista organizing activity has energized a labor movement in desperate need of good news. Recent data from the Bureau of… -
Big Labor’s Resurgence That Wasn’t
January 2022 · Michael Saltsman · Wall Street Journal
Union membership in the private sector fell to 6.1%, a historic low. The Economist predicts “2022 will be the year of the worker.” Interest in organizing is “infectiously spreading from workplace to workplace,” the New Republic claims, concluding: “America is in the midst of a dramatic labor resurgence.” New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics throw cold water on these predictions. The annual BLS report on… -
Job-killing wage mandates set to sweep the country
December 2021 · Michael Saltsman and Rebekah Paxton · Orange County Register
More than 80 states and localities will raise minimum wages on New Year’s Day, an ill-timed mandate if there ever was one. Inflation-linked increases are particularly steep this year, rising nearly five percent on average in more than 55 states and localities that raise wages with the Consumer Price Index (as compared to 1.7 percent last year). In left-of-center locales, these scheduled increases are no longer sufficient:… -
Lorena Gonzalez once again puts union power ahead of workers
May 2021 · Michael Saltsman and Rebekah Paxton · Orange County Register
Leave it to Lorena Gonzalez to name a bill the FAST Recovery Act even though it would slow the state’s economic rebound. Gonzalez, D-Organized Labor, is best known as the author of Assembly Bill 5, which gained national notoriety after it stripped countless freelancers of their incomes. Voters in 2020 delivered a resounding verdict on the law’s applicability to “gig workers,” approving the Proposition 22 ballot measure which… -
Ending the tip credit brings pay cuts, not raises
March 2021 · Rebekah Paxton · Washington Examiner
Here’s a tip that restaurant workers don’t want. The Raise the Wage Act, which will likely return as a standalone bill before Congress, would eliminate the employer credit for tip income and raise the minimum wage for tipped workers to $15 an hour (a 600% increase). But for many restaurant servers and bartenders, this would actually mean taking a pay cut if they aren’t included in the hundreds of thousands… -
Biden Destroys Restaurants to Save Them
January 2021 · Michael Saltsman · Wall Street Journal
Abolishing the tipped minimum wage would wipe out the benefit of his Covid grants. Joe Biden proposes $15 billion in relief grants for America’s Covid-crushed businesses. But he also wants to mandate a new minimum wage that for many restaurants would wipe out the benefit and then some. Restaurants shed some six million jobs in the first two months of the pandemic. As a consequence of continued…