Business of politics

There are municipal ordinances, and then there’s mission creep. A 2005 law on supermarkets passed by the Los Angeles City Council fit the latter category. Unlike the sort of city ordinance you might imagine -- requiring a clean, vermin-free establishment with adequate parking -- the law struck down this week by a Superior Court judge required large supermarkets to keep former employees for at least 90 days after taking over an existing store.

We agree that employers should strive to be good corporate citizens who don’t immediately displace low-wage employees. But a law dictating which individuals a company must employ strays far from the proper function of any government, let alone a city.

The city erred, the judge ruled, by confining the new rule solely to large food markets. That makes sense, though it’s too narrow a ruling to satisfy. The city claims that it was exercising its proper oversight of public health because inexperienced workers might mishandle food. But that’s no more true of a large market than a small one. And if public safety is the ostensible reason, why not require aerospace, junkyards, chemical firms and any other business that handles potentially dangerous materials to do likewise? What damage might inexperienced City Council members do to the public health?

The ordinance deserved to be struck down for numerous reasons, the main one being that hiring grocery clerks is not municipal business.

We hope the courts are similarly inclined when they hear an appeal of the city law that imposes higher minimum wages at hotels near Los Angeles International Airport. That won its first round, but largely over issues about election laws.

Again the city is picking on one kind of business and only a subset of that business, justifying its unwarranted intrusion by saying these hotels wouldn’t thrive if they weren’t near the city-owned airport. If that’s grounds to mandate what private firms should pay their workers, this could be extended to any hotel -- or any business -- located near a city park or, for that matter, along a city street. After all, toy shops and ice cream stores need pavement in order to draw customers.

Certainly, it would be good to see hotel workers paid a reasonable salary. That’s best handled by union negotiations, and labor leaders make a strong case for organizing these hotels. In the meantime, the council could refuse to do city business at the inns in question. But it perilously oversteps boundaries by deciding that if labor disputes don’t go the way it wants, it should take on the role of shop steward.