Parking a link: Update on Chicago Politics

Last updated on: June 24, 2014 at 9:41 am by Jane the Actuary

Parking a link: Update on Chicago Politics 2014-06-24T09:41:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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There was an “opposing sides” pair of opinion pieces in Sunday’s Tribune on a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $15 (the con side said, “it’ll cost jobs,” and the pro side said, “I don’t care about facts because social justice”) which led me to look for details on the proposal, which brought me to a “Chicago City Council Roundup” from a site called progressillinois.com (the details were lacking on the more straight news sites). Lots of great stuff going on at city hall, apparently.

First, the city council debated a new ride-sharing ordinance. I haven’t been following this issue too closely — I keep meaning to get up to speed — but here’s the key quote:

On the council floor, [Ald. Anthony] Beale said the ordinance is not tough enough on ride-sharing firms and “will hurt the hardworking men and women that are driving cabs every single day.” Taxi medallions in Chicago, which cost about $360,000, “will be useless if this ordinance passes.”

Given that the “hardworking” cabdrivers are not the ones who own the medallions, but that their hard work is, in large measure, due to the need to pay the medallion-owners for the right to drive a cab, I have very little sympathy for a medallion-owner whose investment loses some, or even a lot, or all, of its worth, given that their value is artificial and due to city-legislated scarcity anyway.

Then, the minimum wage increase: this is a proposal by the progressive caucus and has 12 – 15 supporters out of a total of 50 aldermen. It would dictate a near-immediate increase in the minimum wage with virtually no phase-in period:

Under the proposed ordinance, large employers in Chicago making at least $50 million annually would have 90 days to raise their employees’ wages to $12.50 an hour, including workers at their subsidiaries and franchise locations. Large employers would then have to raise workers’ hourly wages to the $15 level within one year of the measure taking effect.

Businesses with less than $50 million in annual revenue would have a different minimum wage phase-in period. Small and mid-sized businesses would have to increase their base hourly wage to $12 within 15 months. After that, the smaller employers would have to increase their minimum wage by $1 each year until they hit the $15 level by 2018.

This follows an announcement by Emmanuel of a task force to “study” the minimum wage, so I assume that, since the rule in Chicago is generally, what the mayor wants, the mayor gets, that the magical-thinking $15 proposal won’t go anywhere but that Emmanuel will make sure the task force comes up with a recommendation that he likes, and that this recommendation will be enacted.

There are also details on a gun store ordinance (in brief, through zoning restrictions, virtually the entire city is off limits), a “sweatshop-free” procurement ordinance (because apparently all third-world sweatshops clearly identify themselves to their customers), and a SRO-preservation ordinance (in which SRO owners will be forbidden from converting their buildings to other uses).

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