DC Mayor Vince Gray vetoes council-approved living wage bill, hands Walmart huge victory

[brentspeak]

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/09/12/2611231/mayor-vetoes-living-wage/

DC Mayor Vetoes Living Wage Bill After Walmart’s Protests

By Bryce Covert on September 12, 2013 at 11:12 am

In a letter sent to City Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, DC Mayor Vince Gray (D) announced his veto of a living wage bill aimed at large employers on Thursday morning.

The bill would require retailers with $1 billion in sales or more with 75,000 square feet or larger to pay employees $12.50 an hour in combined wages and benefits with an exception for those that collectively bargain with workers. The existing minimum wage in the city is $8.25 an hour, and increasing the wage to $12.50 would raise annual earnings of a full-time minimum wage worker from about $17,000 to $26,000.

Just ahead of a City Council vote to pass the bill, mega retailer Walmart threatened to walk away from three planned stores if the law were put into effect. The company claims that the bill is “arbitrary and discriminatory.” With Gray’s veto, Walmart released a statement saying, “Now that this discriminatory legislation is behind us, we will move forward on our first stores in our nation’s capital,” according to the Washington City Paper. Other stores like Costco, Home Depot, Target, and Macy’s would also have been impacted by the bill, but the increase in the minimum wage would have been particularly dramatic for Walmart, which pays workers 28 percent less on average than other retailers.

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A body of research shows that increasing the minimum wage doesn’t hurt jobs and in fact can boost businesses’ bottom lines through increasing productivity, lowering turnover, and boosting demand from workers with more money in their pockets. States with minimum wage increases have above average job growth. Low wages are also costly: Workers at just one Walmart location make so little that they end up using around $1 million in public benefits.

Council members plan on holding another vote to override Gray's veto, but it's not clear they have enough members on board to succeed with an override.

Read Gray's circular explanation of why he vetoed the bill.

First, he says the bill would only raise wages for a "small fraction" of workers employed by a "small fraction" of DC retailers (mostly supermarket-sized retailers).

Then, he says that the bill "would affect far more retailers than many supporters think."

Here's more of Gray's tortured reasoning:

“Even if the bill did somehow end up creating a small number of higher-paying jobs, it does nothing to ensure that those jobs would actually be filled by District residents"

...as if the Council would be stupid enough to write legislation deliberately prohibiting non-DC residents from being employed within DC.