Reality Of Life -- Minimum Wage At UC Berkeley -- April 22, 2016

Reason #235 why I love to blog:

Back on October 31, 2015, I posted:

Saturday mornings in north Texas belong to "other" breakfast restaurants, but we seldom go any more: the lines are way too long, and the waits are upwards of 90 minutes. Yes, the Texas breakfasts are that good. But now McDonald's has added a new wrinkle.

Something tells me that we will be reading articles at the end of this business quarter about the decision made by McDonald's to offer breakfast all day long.

It's very possible someone is going to look like a genius.

It would have been fun to sit in on the focus groups and the PowerPoint Presentations when the idea of "all-day breakfast" was being pitched at McDonald's.

Now this, today, from Yahoo!Finance:

McDonald's just reported quarterly sales that beat analysts' expectations.

In the US, first quarter comparable sales increased 5.4%, fueled by the ongoing popularity of All Day Breakfast and the introduction of McPick 2 - a branded national value platform.

Analysts were looking for a more modest 4.4% gain in comparable sales, which represents sales growth in stores open for more than a year.

McDonald's fans' wish for breakfast served all day came true last fall. While this has been disruptive for the competition (and some franchisees), it has been a hit with customers. And McDonald's numbers show it. 

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UC Berkeley School of Hard Knocks MBA

Investor's Business Daily is reporting:

Hundreds of employees at the University of California at Berkeley are getting schooled in basic economics, as the $15 minimum wage just cost them their jobs. Too bad liberal elites “fighting for $15” don’t get it.

A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut.

Coincidence? Not really.

Last year, University of California President Janet Napolitano announced plans to boost its minimum wage to $15 at the start of next school year, independent of the state law. Since UC Berkeley was already in financial trouble — it ran a $109 million deficit last year and is projecting a deficit of $150 million this year — number crunchers there had to have factored in the higher mandated wage when making their layoff decisions.

Those workers might want to have a chat with the folks at UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research, who just days before Brown signed the wage-hike bill released a study touting the minimum wage as a boon to low-income household breadwinners.

After that report came out, Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley center, told the Los Angeles Times, “This is a very big deal for low-wage workers in California, for their families and for their children.”

One thing is missing from this article. The expectation from management is this: if you were making $7.50/hour and now you are making $15/hour, you will be expected to do more.

And, oh, by the way, your social security tax and your income tax withholding will also increase. But, on paper, at least, you are making $15/hour.

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ObamaCare And Part-Time Work

We've blogged about this from the very beginning. Nice to see it's being validated.

From AEI:

And, we still think that the employer mandate to provide health insurance for full-time workers in the Affordable Care Act caused some of the increase in involuntary part-time work. …

In a note last year, we pointed out that the shift strikingly coincided with the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which included an employer mandate to provide health insurance to employees working 30 or more hours per week. As shown in Figure 3 at the link, passage of the ACA preceded a large and unprecedented shift from workers working more than 30 hours per week to just under 30 hours. We continue to believe that the ACA can explain a significant number of the “extra” involuntary part-time workers.