SHAME!!! KANSAS CITY MAYOR AND COUNCIL PASS ILLEGAL MINIMUM WAGE INCREASE AGAINST MISSOURI STATE STATUTES!!!



Today Kansas City Mayor Sly and most of the City council passed an ordinance increasing the minimum wage which Missouri state statutes explicitly forbid.

Mayor Sly, an attorney by trade, was defiant in the final moments before the decision:



Mayor James said: ""I know the risks, but I will take that risk . . ."

The crowd cheered when the ordinance was passed . . . I've got a feeling that a lot of these red shirt protestors are being paid for their advocacy, I wonder if they're getting minimum wage???

Important note . . . Only Ed Ford voted against citing the 18 & under teen exemption.

It's not all good news in this imaginary bit of amazingly bad political theater . . .

The increase is $8.50 by Aug. 24, $13 by 2020 . . . Anybody under 18 doesn't get the increase . . . But then again, NOBODY is getting this pay bump and critics of the measure have already prepped their legal arguments.

Moreover . . .

HERE'S THE QUESTION NOBODY ELSE IS ASKING: MAYOR SLY, IF YOU AREN'T WILLING TO RESPECT THE LAWS THAT GOVERN MISSOURI, WHY SHOULD ANYBODY ELSE?!?!

Mainstream media denizens would like readers to think there is some ambiguity about this law. Countless Missouri politicos keep reminding us that that Section 67.1571, Section 71.010. and Section 290.502 RSMo. say otherwise . . .

And so, Kansas City commits to a court fight in order to defend this bit of legislation that already contradicts other laws on the books AND so many small biz owners have spoken out against.

UPDATE AND MSM Links:
Lawsuits likely over KC's new minimum wage ordinance
Kansas City Council Raises City's Minimum Wage
KCMO City Council OK's minimum wage hike to $13 an hour by 2020
KC boosts local minimum wage in defiance of Missouri law - Kansas City Business Journal
Developing . . .

Comments

  1. it's blood money day in Kansas city.

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  2. I support the mayor on this. Not all laws are good or moral, and some laws serve the most powerful, and ignore the least. Thanks for passing this. Even if it goes nowhere, it was a moral stance.

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  3. The Obama Effect.

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  4. What risk?

    It's only taxpayer dollars he is risking so why should he care. Tax dollars will be given to lawyers to fight this so in the end the only winners will be the lawyers and James knows this. It's a political move by him and his cronies to look good for the section 8 groups to gather more votes from in the future.

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  5. The idea that what was done is OK for the sake of being moral is bullshit. That is why we have laws - there are too many versions of what is right. You can bet that right now a state legislator is on the phone looking for the right businessman to refuse to bow to the city and you can bet that at some point the state legislature is going to take action to put a halt to Sly James personal war against Missouri.

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  6. Pretty sure that if this vote had gone the other way your headline would have been something like "KANSAS CITY MINIMUM WAGE WORKERS STAY LOSING!!! COUNCIL DENIES PAY INCREASE IN SHAMEFUL VOTE!"

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  7. The Obama Effect: getting things done even when people around you are firmly cemented in the past. Happy to see people who have been elected by the people, speak for the people.
    I'm glad that I can comprehend MO state law being wrong. We don't need to follow antiquated restrictions.

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  8. The Downtown Council gets TIFs for their projects!
    The millenials get a streetcar for their amusement!
    Workers get pay raises mandated by city government!
    You get a new car!
    You get a new car!
    Everybody gets a new car!
    And all with someone else's money.
    Thanks Oprah Sly!

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  9. Actually 700 Tony has taken this same stance on this issue, throughout. But dont let facts get in the way of your ad nauseam critique of TKC, while you spend untold hours weekly hanging on every post .

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  10. Can we start a recall petition on this guy before he totally destroys KC?

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  11. Dowe Cheatem Andhow7/16/15, 7:22 PM

    Let the lawsuits begin!

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  12. Stupid assholes no sense in the lot

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  13. I have a strong suspicion that a class-action lawsuit by affected businesses against KCMO would be easily litigated and won for the plaintiffs.

    Can you say KA-CHING!!! That's the sound of KCMO ringing up a multi-million dollar settlement offer.......because everyone now knows they're too incompetent to go to court and defend themselves.

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  14. The sad part is the city using these fucking morons like pawns only to get even a temporary tax revenue boost. Kansas City - City of Pickpockets!

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  15. Is this political theater part of the Fringe Festival?

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  16. 7:58, if you are referring to the lunatic fringe, probably.

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  17. The joke is on the incoming council who will have to fund this legal circus. What a legacy they leave. I'm sure they were at home screaming at the T.V. "Please just go back to Italy and Spain or wherever we last paid for you to go and stop screwing things up for us" . I guess it is fitting they should leave as they served, like dumbshits.

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  18. Is this the first campaign plank for Sly to run for Congress and take out Cleaver?

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  19. The joke is on the incoming council who will have to fund this legal circus. What a legacy they leave. I'm sure they were at home screaming at the T.V. "Please just go back to Italy and Spain or wherever we last paid for you to go and stop screwing things up for us" . I guess it is fitting they should leave as they served, like dumbshits.

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  20. The City also condemned more than 20 acres worth of privately owned land under a similarly illegal ordinance. Citizens of this City are brain-dead. We police this City, not City Hall. City Council only gets away with what you allow. Get off your lazy butts and resist this nonsense.

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  21. What hsppens next with Missouri laws? Why write laws if they're not to be followed? The City is out of compliance!

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  22. Fast Food Workers: You Don’t Deserve $15 an Hour to Flip Burgers, and That’s OK

    Dear fast food workers,

    It’s come to my attention that many of you, supposedly in 230 cities across the country, are walking out of your jobs today and protesting for $15 an hour. You earnestly believe — indeed, you’ve been led to this conclusion by pandering politicians and liberal pundits who possess neither the slightest grasp of the basic rules of economics nor even the faintest hint of integrity — that your entry-level gig pushing buttons on a cash register at Taco Bell ought to earn you double the current federal minimum wage.

    I’m aware, of course, that not all of you feel this way. Many of you might consider your position as Whopper Assembler to be rather a temporary situation, not a career path, and you plan on moving on and up not by holding a poster board with “Give me more money!” scrawled across it, but by working hard and being reliable. To be clear, I am not addressing the folks in this latter camp. They are doing what needs to be done, and I respect that.

    Instead, I want to talk to those of you who actually consider yourselves entitled to close to a $29,000 a year full-time salary for doing a job that requires no skill, no expertise and no education; those who think a fry cook ought to earn an entry-level income similar to a dental assistant; those who insist the guy putting the lettuce on my Big Mac ought to make more than the emergency medical technician who saves lives for a living; those who believe you should automatically be able to “live comfortably,” as if “comfort” is a human right.

    To those in this category, I have a few things I need to say, for your own sake:

    First, let me start with a story. It’s anecdotal, obviously, but then this whole #FightFor15 “movement” is based entirely on anecdotes.

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  23. submit mine: I’m 28 years old now. I started working when I was about 15. I did hourly, customer service-type stuff at grocery stores, snowball stands and pizza places, never making much more than the bare minimum at any of them.

    When I was 20 I moved out of the house and got my first job in radio. Starting out as a rock DJ in Delaware, I made $17,000 a year, or about $8 an hour. I lived off of that, earning a few small raises through the years — having to eat fewer meals, buy fewer things, and, God forbid, even forgo cable and Internet access in my apartment — right up to when I got married at 25.

    Around my 26th birthday, over 10 years after my first job, I landed a position in Kentucky that paid me around $40,000. It was the first time I’d ever made the equivalent of $15 an hour or more. Again, this was after 10 years of working. Of course, our newfound wealth soon had to be split between four people, as my wife became pregnant with our twins within a few months of me starting the job.

    After finding out that we were expecting not one baby, but two, I started my website. I wrote every day for six months before I made much more than a dime on it. It wasn’t until August 2013 that I earned my first significant chunk of money. By my 27th birthday last year, I was finally making a “comfortable living.”

    It took me over a decade to get here.

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  24. You think the jobs I had when I was 16 should have provided me with the comfortable living I just established in my late 20s? Frankly, I think you’re delusional.

    To understand how delusional, consider that a $15 an hour full-time salary would put you in the same ballpark as biologists, auto mechanics, biochemists, teachers, geologists, roofers and bank tellers.

    You’d be making more than some police officers.

    You’d easily out-earn many firefighters.

    Ironically, you’d be fast food workers with starting salaries higher than many professional chefs, which is a bit like paying a tattoo artist less than the person who paints cat whiskers on your face at the carnival.

    You’d be halfway to the income of accountants, engineers and physical therapists.

    Does that sound fair? It might sound fun, but does it sound fair? These are highly skilled jobs that require years of training and education. These are jobs which, in some cases, our society profoundly relies upon. Jobs with enormous responsibilities. Jobs that are considerably more complex and complicated than refilling the soda fountain at Roy Rogers.

    I’m not insulting you, but when you claim you ought to be able to stroll into Hardee’s and be immediately rewarded with a salary higher than crane operators and medical lab technicians, someone needs to talk some sense into you.

    I wish I didn’t have to point out that you are doing something which is fundamentally worth very little, but when you stomp your feet and insist you should be handed what some of us worked decades to earn, that’s when it becomes time for, as the kids would say, real talk.

    So, real talk: Your job isn’t worth 15 bucks an hour. Sure, as a human being, you’re priceless. As a child of God, you’re precious, a work of art, a freaking miracle. But your job wrapping hamburgers in foil and putting them in paper bags — that has a price tag, and the price tag ain’t anywhere close to the one our economy and society puts on teachers and mechanics.

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  25. Don’t like it? Well, you shouldn’t. It’s fast food. It’s menial. It’s mindless. It’s not supposed to be a career. It’s not supposed to be a living. An entry-level position making roast beef sandwiches at Arby’s isn’t meant to be something you do for 26 years.

    It isn’t paying enough? OK, get another job. Get a second job. Get a third job. Get a different job.

    Trust me, this is a better plan than asking the government to force your employer to pay you significantly more than the market allows.

    I know you might not care about the economics of this thing. After all, you aren’t economists (but with $15 an hour you’d almost be in the same income bracket). But it should be of some interest to learn a $15 an hour minimum wage would represent a steep tax on jobs. And the problem is simple: when you tax something, you get less of it.

    Why? Because, despite what Elizabeth Warren might tell you, these fast food franchise owners have a finite amount of money to spend on operating expenses. They aren’t making millions in profits, most of them, so when you come along and say, “Hey, your labor costs just doubled — congratulations!” that business owner will have to make decisions.

    It’s not about what he wants to do, it’s what he’ll have to do.

    And those decisions will likely start with the most obvious: hire less, fire more. If you do survive that first cut — which, if you’re skipping work to hold signs in the parking lot, I don’t like your chances — then you’ll have to deal with greater expectations, more responsibilities and less room for error. In other words, at a minimum, you won’t get away with treating your customers like dirt.

    But after a while, as automation technologies become more and more ubiquitous, your employer will look for the first chance to replace you with a machine that can do the same thing more efficiently and for less money. It’s not that he’ll want to, necessarily, it’s that he will have to, in order to stay in business.

    You might be aware that “studies” exist “proving” the minimum wage increases employment and reduces poverty. But studies can prove anything you want them to prove, and in this case, most credible research indicates the opposite.

    Extensive investigations have demonstrated a causal link between job loss and minimum wage hikes, and even the Congressional Budget Office says that a minimum wage of just over $10 an hour could cost half a million jobs.

    Besides, what we’re talking about here — or what you’re talking about — is not an incremental hike, but a massive, sudden, dramatic, calamitous spike that upends the economy and, in one instant, makes low-skill fast food employment more profitable than dozens of other far more skilled, far more important types of jobs. None of these estimates, then, even come close to capturing the lunacy of a $15 an hour minimum wage.

    Do you think it can happen in a vacuum? Do you think we can magically take a 17-year-old Wendy’s employee, give him a salary commensurate with law enforcement officers and emergency medical workers, and everything will just continue along as normal?

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  26. RECALL THE MAYOR.

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  27. dat nigger fucks up everything.

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  28. Scotty James lost his voice

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  29. So let me get this straight... No money for police, no money for road repairs, raising my utilities because no money to fix the sewer system. Basic services we are one broke city but yet money for trains, mega hotels, grocery stores, and now a lawsuit we know we'll lose. Welcome to Detroit, Missouri.

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  30. King Sly has spoken.

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  31. The foundations of the Internet were laid on free expression, but the founders just did not understand how effective their creation would be for the coordination and amplification of harassing behavior. Or that the users who were the biggest bullies would be rewarded with attention for their behavior. Or that young people would come to see this bullying as the norm — as something to emulate in an effort to one-up each other. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was founded to help protect Internet civil liberties, concluded this year: “The sad irony is that online harassers misuse the fundamental strength of the Internet as a powerful communication medium to magnify and co-ordinate their actions and effectively silence and intimidate others.”

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  32. ^^^^^^^^^^^

    So calling bullshit on the Mayor and fake law is now a crime?

    Go fudge yourself EFF!

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  33. But we do have money for police, in fact we spend 50% of our general fund on our police force.

    And we do ave money for road repairs, in fact we do an admiriable job of maintaining our more lane miles of road per capita than just about any other city our size has.

    And we do have money for sewers and are repairing them, and the city doesn't control your utility costs.

    And the streetcar is funded by a self-imposed tax which you are not in any way required to pay. Just don't shop in the TDD. It hasn't used a dime from the general fund.

    And the best way for the city to have more money to accomplish such things even better, is to have a wealthier tax base, the easiest way to accomplish that is to enact a minimum wage that is more in line with the wild gains in worker productivity, corporate profits, and the increased cost of living.

    Hate to burst your hate-bubble.

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  34. 9:46, 9:47, 9:48; what a well-written post! Thank-you for stating what most of us assume everyone knows.

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  35. 9:46-9:48: Reality check. $15 per hour equates to about $30K per year. Do you have any idea what full-time biologists, auto mechanics, biochemists, teachers, geologists, roofers, bank tellers, police officers or firefighters earn? And most of them get vacation and sick leave and some even get pensions.

    You've been eating too many apples and oranges. And yes, I, too, once worked minimum wage jobs, but I didn't have to support a family.

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  36. There is no way the city can win on this one. Franchises are not going to charge three times as much for product when they can just move out of KC. Folks are not going to pay three times more for product when they can just drive a block outside of KC. Small business can not afford Obamacare and city wages. They aren't just competing with the guy down the street in KC. This is not the first time the city has gone too far sticking their nose in private enterprise, but rest assured the result will be the same.

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  37. Tony, the nation has a long history of civil disobedience and lower jurisdictions passing laws against state or federal authority to push the courts for a reading.

    We don't have a responsibility to be respectful of laws we dont think are just. In fact, we have a responsibility to TEST THEM to see if they remain viable.

    Whose side are you on, Tony? THe peoples' side or the establishment's side?

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  38. "Mainstream media denizens would like readers to think there is some ambiguity about this law. Countless Missouri politicos keep reminding us that that Section 67.1571, Section 71.010. and Section 290.502 RSMo. say otherwise . . . "

    Are you sure about that?

    http://www.brennancenter.org/press-release/missouri-court-declares-cities-have-power-enact-living-wage-laws

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