The ever-shy Michael Bloomberg took to the radio airwaves this morning to offer up his thoughts on a living-wage bill about to be enacted by City Council. He’s not a fan. In fact, Bloomberg sees the bill — which reports say would impact only an estimated 500 workers a year — as the canary in the coal mine for something much, much bigger. Communism!
“The last time we really had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn’t work out so well,” Bloomberg said. “You cannot stop the tides from coming in.” Really getting into his nostalgia for the Red Scare of his youth, Bloomberg also promised to file a lawsuit against the living-wage bill, which would require that certain recipients of large city-sponsored economic-development subsidies set wages at a minimum of $10 an hour.
Bloomberg also referred to a proposed plan to require employers to offer their employees a minimum number of paid sick days as “God-awful.” “It would be great if all jobs in the city paid a lot of money and had great benefits for the workers. Not good for the employers,” he said. “But if you force that you will just drive businesses out of the city.” To someplace where employees are treated with proper shoddiness, presumably. Perhaps … communist China?
