IN 23 states plus the District of Columbia, 2025 will bring a boost in the legal minimum wage. The hourly increases will range from 25 cents in Ohio and Montana to $2.15 in Michigan. In several states, the lowest hourly rate at which a worker can be hired will be more than $16 and the rate in D.C., now $17.50, will be higher still.
So the lesson will have to be relearned yet again: Mandatory minimum wage increases hurt many of the people they are supposedly meant to help. Boosting the lowest wage at which someone may legally be employed ensures that many working people, especially those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, will find themselves priced out of a job.
Minimum wage increases are popular with lawmakers, journalists, and advocates who care more about good intentions than good results. But even the best of intentions can't override fundamental laws of economics, and the Law of Demand is about as fundamental as they come: All other things being equal, when the price of something goes up, demand for that something goes down. That is true whether the something in question is a house, an iced coffee, a pack of cigarettes, an automobile trip, a pizza — or an employee. Ever since the first federal minimum wage law was passed in 1938, such laws have had the effect of eliminating some people's wages entirely.
Again and again, the impact of minimum wage increases has been subjected to scrutiny. Again and again, the results have been confirmed. When Congress's fiscal research agency released one such study in 2021, the Globe ran a story on its findings. The headline told it all: "Minimum wage hike to $15 an hour by 2025 would result in 1.4 million unemployed, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says."
Yet politicians keep raising the minimum wage; activists keep clamoring to raise it even higher; and marginalized workers — those with fewer skills, little experience, substandard education, or a frail social network — keep paying the price.
Now, from California, comes still more proof.
 An In-N-Out Burger employee in Santa Ana, Calif. |
In 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill imposing a targeted $20 minimum wage on fast-food chain restaurants — an amount 25 percent higher than the $16 per hour that applies in every other sector of California's economy. Even before the law took effect in April 2024, its damaging consequences were apparent. "California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise," a Wall Street Journal story on March 25 was headlined.
"Some pizza-chain operators in California are laying off drivers ahead of the wage law's start and farming out delivery service to apps," the Journal reported. "Franchisees for Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza ... said they plan to lay off around 1,280 delivery drivers this year." Other chains announced a freeze on hiring or reductions in workers' hours.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, fast-food employment in California shrank from 570,909 jobs in September 2023, when the legislation was signed, to 564,743 in June 2024 — a loss of 6,166 jobs, or 1.1 percent. During the same 10-month period a year earlier, California's fast-food sector had grown, adding 17,528 jobs, or 3.1 percent.
Could there be other explanations? Perhaps the thousands of lost jobs in California reflect a bad year for the fast-food sector nationwide? Nope: According to the Employment Policies Institute, "California's fast-food job losses are unique to the state – total private sector fast-food employment nationwide grew over the same period," adding more than 74,000 jobs.
Nor can the layoffs and hiring freezes at fast-food restaurants be attributed to California's broader economic struggles. It is true that overall private employment in California fell during those 10 months, but only by 0.3 percent. The decline in the fast-food industry was almost four times as steep.
So once again we are reminded that reality isn't optional. Minimum wage laws invariably make some jobs unaffordable and some workers unemployable. Populist rhetoric about bestowing "a raise" on low-income workers may give politicians and advocates a warm and fuzzy glow. But workers still struggling to grasp the lowest rung of the economic ladder aren't helped by foolish laws that push that rung higher than they can reach.
A postscript: Perhaps California voters are starting to get the message. In last month's election, they narrowly rejected Proposition 32, a ballot measure that would have increased the state's overall minimum wage from $16 to $18. Never before had a majority of California voters defeated an initiative to hike the statewide minimum wage. The vote won't undo the harm inflicted on all those unemployed fast-food workers, but it will prevent thousands of other jobs from being lost. It's a step in the right direction.
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Hotels on the bucket list
Had I but money enough and time, I would travel the world in style. I would do so in order to explore great cities, visit sites where history was made, and view natural wonders. But I would also do so for the pleasure of spending time in the planet's most storied and elegant hotels.
I have been paging hungrily through "Grand Hotels of the World," a beautiful coffee-table book in which the British travel author Ellie Seymour celebrates 40 majestic hotels on five continents. Each hotel is described in an engaging mini-essay about its history, unique features, and renowned guests, and illustrated with enchanting photographs, both contemporary and historic.
I was in my early 20s the first time I stayed in a beautiful hotel. It was during my final year of law school and I was interviewing with law firms for a job after graduation. (Back then I expected to spend my career in the law, not journalism.) How the process works today I don't know, but in the 1980s, big firms from around the country would send recruiting partners to meet briefly with students at the law school campus. Any students they were interested in getting to know better would then be invited on a "call-back" to visit the firms (at their expense) in their home city and to be interviewed at length by several partners. I received such invitations from several firms, most in cities I had never been to.
 The Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni on the shore of Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy. |
After all these years, the callback I remember best was to San Francisco. I no longer recall the name of the law firm or any of the attorneys I met on that trip. What I do remember was the hotel I was put up in — the beautiful St. Francis in the city's Union Square. It was my first experience of hotel luxury, and I was amazed to think that there were people in the world who took such resplendence and unstinting comfort for granted. Only a few years earlier, the emperor of Japan had been a guest at the hotel. Queen Elizabeth II arrived for a visit not long after mine.
In the decades since, the hotels I have checked into have generally been satisfactory but not lavish — i.e., affordable. But every once in a great while I have had the opportunity to check into a sumptuous hotel and briefly sample the lifestyles of the rich and famous. On a trip to Cairo many years ago, I stayed at the opulent El Gezirah Hotel, which is located on an island in the Nile River and surrounded by exquisitely beautiful gardens. In Taiwan, I was put up for two nights at the Shangri-La in Taipei, a hotel of voluptuary beauty and indulgence.
Neither the St. Francis, the El Gezirah, or the Shangri-La is among the 40 hotels in Seymour's book. But I was delighted to see profiles of two venues I have been to.
One was the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in the picturesque village of Bellagio, Italy. I stayed there in 1998 during a trip to Milan and the Lake Como region with the late David Brudnoy, who for many years was Boston's foremost radio talk host. According to Seymour, the hotel was built in 1850 by an Italian count as a getaway for his wife and was expanded into a hotel in the 1870s. It was an instant success and over the years has attracted welcomed guests as varied as Franz Liszt, Winston Churchill, and Clark Gable.
Some years earlier, during a vacation in Morocco, I spent two days at La Mamounia, a splendid hotel in Marrakech that Seymour describes as "otherworldly" and "a symbol of traditional Moroccan hospitality." I recall blue-tiled walls, an enormous swimming pool, the call to prayer from the 12th-century Kutubiyaa mosque nearby, and framed stills from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much," parts of which were filmed in La Mamounia in 1956.
But that still leaves 95 percent of the legendary venues in "Grand Hotels of the World" on my bucket list. Among them are the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, with its maple Chippendale cash register; the Thermae Palace in Ostend on Belgium's North Sea coast, which once welcomed Edith Piaf and Louis Armstrong; the Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur, India, a vision of white in the middle of Lake Pichola; the red-themed Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris, where geranium-filled window boxes hang from every balcony; the Hotel Mount Nelson, at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa; and Raffles, the famed Singapore hotel that Seymour calls "the grandest of the grand dames."
I haven't been to any of them yet. Someday, perhaps.
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The Last Line
"Oh, Auntie Em — there's no place like home!" — Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland) in The Wizard of Oz (1939)
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Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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