Children’s charity closes due to Murphy’s minimum wage increase

While we generally support the idea of a minimum wage, the blinkered ideological approach of “one size fits all” is having a bad effect on those who serve some of our most vulnerable residents.  The best way to ensure a rising minimum wage is through collective bargaining through the unionization of the work force.  Labor negotiating in the free marketplace with capital produces individual outcomes that are collectively much better than the imposition of mandates from above that Governor Phil Murphy and his gang favor.  

Lori Comstock of the New Jersey Herald did a great job covering one such tragedy today:

Kids Educational Enrichment Program, a childcare organization best known as K.E.E.P. that has served the Sussex County community for over 100 years, will be shutting its doors for good next week.

The announcement was sent to parents and guardians via a letter dated July 17. The letter, signed by K.E.E.P., Inc. Board of Directors President Barbara Vandenbergh, said the nonprofit will cease operations effective at close of business on Wednesday, July 31.

The letter states many reasons for the closure including a mix of "usual" business challenges coupled with "increasingly strict and ever-changing regulatory requirements imposed on the industry" by the state and the state's mandatory minimum wage increase schedule which has, combined, "rendered us unable to meet our financial obligations," Vandenbergh wrote. Earlier this year, Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation boosting the state's minimum wage and implemented a five-year phase starting with an increase from $8.85 to $10, which went into effect July 1, to $15, which will be reached by January 2024.

In the letter, Vandenbergh states that "after much investigation and future financial projections" the board came to the decision to close.

…K.E.E.P., formerly known as Sussex County YWCA, was incorporated in 1917. The program, which is dubbed the largest child care provider in the county, according to its Facebook page, offers flexible scheduling, low rates and financial assistance to qualified families. A registered 501(c)3 organization, K.E.E.P. employed 72 people in the year 2015, according to the latest 990 form available by the Internal Revenue Service.

Perhaps there should be a philanthropic wage for those who want to volunteer to do good works but need something to cover the basics?  This is what an individual union, covering these individual workers, could accomplish.  If the management of a charity couldn’t figure out a way to make it work, there would be a ready organization – the union – to step in and try.  What we have now are top-down mandates that don’t take the realities on the ground into account.  One-size fits all… except that it doesn’t.

Please read Ms. Comstock’s full article here…

https://www.njherald.com/20190723/keep-ceasing-operations-next-week

Pushing for a $15 minimum wage, the Star-Ledger pays its drivers $10 an hour (are any undocumented?)

The Star-Ledger doesn’t report the news.  As Editor Tom Moran wrote (November 1, 2018):  “Our core mission is helping voters decide which lever to pull.” 

That’s right, the Star-Ledger is a advocacy organization.  First and foremost, you can always depend on the Star-Ledger to lobby for its own bottom line. 

For years, the newspaper was a strident supporter of the New Jersey State Supreme Court’s Abbott Decision – which forces working class families in suburban and rural New Jersey to subsidize the property taxes of wealthy corporations and professionals in urban areas.  Among those wealthy corporations was the parent corporation that owns the Star-Ledger, whose property holdings were so extensive in Newark that the city named a street… no, make that a plaza, after the Star-Ledger. 

Now comes this new hypocrisy.

A few days before Christmas, the New Jersey Globe reported that while editorializing for a $15 minimum wage, the Star-Ledger  was paying workers at $10 an hours, with no benefits.  The corporation that owns the Star-Ledger is itself owned by one of the richest families in America. 

Here’s an excerpt from the New Jersey Globe:

The state’s largest daily newspaper ran an advertisement in Wednesday’s print edition seeking drivers for newspaper deliveries willing to work 2-3 hours daily, “starting around 3 AM,” with a typical bi-weekly compensation that starts at $400.   That could mean less than $10-per-hour.

To get a job like that, applicants must have their own cars. Star-Ledger drivers – they call them Delivery Service Providers — receive no benefits; they “are independently contacted, meaning they are self-employed” and receive 1099s.   Minimum wage laws do not apply.

There is no paid vacation time, no workers compensation, and since drivers do not handle collections, there are no gratuities involved.

“The job, once the bastion of neighborhood kids looking to make a few extra bucks on their bikes, has evolved into a grueling nocturnal marathon for low-income workers who toil almost invisibly on the edge of the economy,” wrote Associated Press reporter Michael Levenson in 2016.

Today the Star-Ledger once again editorialized for drivers’ licenses for resident undocumented immigrants illegally in the United States.  Is this another self-serving position for the owners to take?  Will this help drive down the cost of newspaper distribution?  We wonder if there are any internal memos on this?

While the Star-Ledger and its owners are up on all the latest virtue-signaling, paying just enough lip-service to reassure the cocktail set that they are good and worthy people, their actions seek to drive down the wages of American workers, while creating an immigrant class of toiling wage slaves.  Raising the minimum wage is a farce until you can control the gray economy that doesn’t abide by such rules.  Normalizing the gray economy (by things like drivers licenses) will only solidify its position as an alternative workforce.

And while the Democrats talk about the minimum wage, Governor Murphy is doing his utmost to flood the state with illegal labor that every economist tells us will drive down wages.  When there is more of something, you pay less, we all know that.  Either the Democrats are well-meaning but stupid, or they are engaging in the very same hypocrisy that the Star-Ledger is engaging in.

Here is the original New Jersey Globe story:

https://newjerseyglobe.com/media/star-ledger-editorializes-in-support-of-15-hour-wage-but-pays-drivers-much-less/