With victory in L.A., the $15 minimum wage fight goes national
On Labor Day last year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti went to a celebration in a park on the south end of the city and announced what he called “the largest anti-poverty program in the city’s history”: boosting the minimum wage to $13.25 per hour by 2017. It was an ambitious move for a town that hadn’t recovered quite as strongly from the recession as two of its northern neighbors — Seattle and San Francisco. Legislators in those two cities had recently voted to go all the way to $15 an hour. But even L.A.’s more modest proposal still drew howls of resistance from corporate leaders, who predicted businesses would lay people off and flee the city in droves.