Re: “Where Is Support? Meghan Wants $15 Wage Floor” 

To no one’s surprise, Meghan Sahli-Wells, the most progressive member of the City Council, planted herself in an expected position:

“Personally,” she said, “I am happy to see the minimum wage go up in Los Angeles, unincorporated L.A. County, possibly in New York City for fast-food workers, Seattle and a lot of other places.”

But Ms. Sahli-Wells hardly is relaxing.

“I am interested in seeing how this plays out,” she said, “since it is a relatively new movement.

“You have people on both sides saying – one side says this will raise people out of poverty and minimize peoples’ dependence on social services. Therefore, they say, this will have a positive effect on not only individual families but on taxpayers as well.”

Councilperson Sahli-Wells turned to opponents of the fast-spreading $15 minimum. “While there are business people very much in favor, the business community is saying ‘This is going to ruin us. We are going to have to fire people,” she said.

Which brought Ms. Sahli-Wells to her hometown.

“Now Culver City has a chance to sit back take a look at what the real-world consequences are going to be for what has been, up to now, a theoretical exercise.”

To buttress her side of the debate, Ms. Sahli-Wells cited an online report from MIT.

“It showed that for a person to be able to survive in Culver City – pay the rent, pay for healthcare, pay for food, pay for clothing – the minimum wage would have to be on the order of $34 per hour,” and she had to chuckle at the irony. “The cost of living is just so high. You can see how far the present minimum is below that.”

Ms. Sahli-Wells does not know how many minimum wage workers there are in Culver City or how many of them live within the corporation limit.

“But I am going to be looking into this,” she vowed.