How not to save jobs

THE LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL showed last week that its heart is in the right place. Its brain is another matter.

By an 11-2 vote, the council passed an ordinance mandating that the purchasers of grocery stores bigger than 15,000 square feet must keep existing employees for at least 90 days. The idea was to provide at least a small cushion of security for employees who have been hit hard in recent years by industry mergers and layoffs.

Although we certainly sympathize with the plight of grocery workers, many of them getting by on very low pay and facing an uncertain future, the council’s move is highly questionable on several levels. Employment law, broadly speaking, is the purview of Washington and Sacramento. And why single out grocery stores? Why only those bigger than 15,000 square feet?

Having the City Council regulate the hiring and firing decisions of private businesses -- especially in such a capricious way -- only reinforces the perception that the city of Los Angeles is hostile to business. There is a law dictating that companies doing business with the city have to wait 90 days after an ownership change to fire people without cause, but regulating city contractors is very different from regulating private businesses that don’t work for the city.

The council’s flimsy legal justification for the action was its responsibility to protect the health and safety of city residents; the twisted argument here is that forcing supermarkets to retain experienced workers who understand food safety rules helps safeguard the public health. Since there is no reason to suppose that the workers being retained would be any less experienced than the ones being laid off, and since only a small percentage of grocery workers handles potentially hazardous foods, this is a long stretch -- and may (hopefully will) open the city to a lawsuit.

Further, mergers and layoffs occur regularly in every industry, so why target only supermarkets? A cynic would say it’s because City Council President Alex Padilla is running for state Senate and needs the support of the politically potent United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The ordinance’s two opponents, Councilmen Bernard C. Parks and Greig Smith, rightly pointed out that the measure will only encourage supermarket owners to locate outside the city. But this isn’t just about supermarkets. Plenty of other businesses trying to decide where to invest their finite resources may scratch L.A. off their list thanks to such heavyhanded regulations. And that will lead to fewer jobs for the City Council to fret about protecting.