Los Angeles Discovers That Its Effort to Force Employers to Pay a 'Just Wage' Is a Cruel Joke

How many times do people around the world have to serve as human guinea pigs in yet another experiment to see if socialism works? Apparently this hasn’t yet been done enough, for we are now just beginning a new attempt to show forth its wonders in New York City, and on the other side of the country, the people of Los Angeles are just finding out yet again that efforts to force economic equality only create more economic inequality. All the past victims of socialism could have told them that before they dived in one more time, but of course, they weren’t listening. 

Fox News reported Saturday that “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.” 

Well, knock me over with a feather. You mean a law that was supposed to help the little guy ended up hurting that same little guy? Wow, who saw that coming? Only anyone with the slightest awareness of how economics works, and of what people who own businesses generally do when faced with rising costs of doing business. But that apparently leaves out the entire far-left political class of Los Angeles, and of California in general.

Fox noted that Hotel Association of Los Angeles (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.” Of course. Democrats sell minimum wage hikes to the economically illiterate by claiming that they will help those who are struggling to get by. However, businesses as well as individuals struggle to get by. A business that has a certain amount of money set aside for salaries and then has to increase that amount because of minimum wage hikes is likely to make up for the shortfall, and continue to meet payroll expenses it could barely afford in the first place, by laying off workers.

Thus the whole thing is a nasty trick on lower-wage earners. It promises them a raise, but pays for that raise for a few by throwing others out of their jobs altogether. And so HALA President Dr. Jackie Filla lamented: "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." 

Yes. LA’s far-left Mayor Karen Bass “signed the ordinance into law May 27, 2025, after it was approved by the Los Angeles City Council. The measure is often referred to as the "Olympic Wage" in reference to the sporting event being held in Los Angeles in 2028 and will raise pay for hotel and LAX airport workers up to $30 per hour by 2028.” 

Filla, however, “says she is urging elected officials from the city council to the mayor to make ‘amendments’ to the ordinance to ease the burden on the hospitality industry.” She explained: "We are at the very beginning of the series of these increases and hundreds of hotel workers have already lost their jobs. Even more are seeing their hours reduced. We've seen restaurant closures within hotels, parking is already getting more expensive, and improvements and the creation of new buildings altogether are being delayed or canceled. So taken together, these impacts should really sound alarm bells for our local policymakers."

Indeed they do. But they don’t have the immediate appeal to low-information voters of telling them “I’m going to raise your wages!” Nobody who heard this appeal from Bass or her fellow socialists thought he or she would be the one to be out of a job, and that epitomizes the dichotomy between the promise of socialism and its reality in practice. It holds out to those who struggling economically the promise of easy money, packaged as a fair shake, a strike back against the greed and rapacity of The Man. In practice, however, those who live under socialism always pay in, in all kinds of ways, far more than they get back.

Related: New York’s First Free Grocery Store Shows Yet Again That Socialism Doesn’t Work

How many of the people losing their jobs now in Los Angeles voted for Karen Bass and approved of the minimum wage hike? Probably most of them. “In many instances,” says Fox, “the workers who lose their jobs are working-class or blue-collar individuals and Filla pointed out that many managers and general managers started off as cooks or dishwashers and advanced through executive training programs which now are less available due to financial shortfalls.”

The people who have the bad luck of having to stay in Los Angeles hotels will feel the pinch almost as much as will the laid-off workers: “The study put out by HALA found that a significant number of the jobs lost have been labor-intensive positions like food and beverage, housekeeping, and parking. The study also found that 62% of hotels expect staff hours to decrease in 2026, with three-quarters anticipating reductions of at least 10%.” 

And so Los Angeles is getting wage justice. And will pay dearly for it.