Letters: L.A.’s pay gap

Re “Minimum wage debate brewing: L.A. expected to propose paying workers at large hotels $15 an hour,” Jan. 14, and “Report backs minimum wage of $15,” Jan. 15

The L.A. City Council needs to invoke some logic and common sense in its thinking process. A maid working in a 100-room hotel would be paid $15 an hour while a maid working in a 99-room hotel would be paid $8 an hour? Is it that the rooms at the 100-room hotel are cleaner because the worker makes $15 an hour? Travelers might be less likely to stay at a 99-room hotel knowing that the staff was paid less and the rooms were perhaps cleaned just enough to earn that $8.

If the City Council is going to address the issue of a minimum wage in Los Angeles, then it should set a floor wage for all workers in the city, not single out any one job position, occupation or industry.

What’s next? A data processor working for an employer with 50 workers is paid less than a

data processor working for an employer with 100 workers? A shipping clerk working for a big-box retailer makes $8 an hour while a shipping clerk for an online employer makes $15 an hour?

Rico Lagattuta

Thousand Oaks

Industry establishes wages according to the skills and education required for the task. What are the skills of a hotel maid? A maid makes beds, dusts, vacuums and cleans floors and bathrooms. These are the skills acquired by a properly raised eighth-grade child.

What are the basic skills in the fast-food industry? Workers need to read the keys to take an order; a machine tells them how much the order costs and the correct change. They also may be required to wash floors, clean tables or bathrooms, stock cups and other assorted tasks. Again, job skills a person in junior high can possess.

The down economy required some higher-skill people to take these jobs. However, the tasks performed do not require higher pay. The employee’s payback comes when his resume demonstrates his work ethnic compared with a similarly qualified person on unemployment.

Alan L. Strzemieczny
Riverside

Good grief: A $15-an-hour minimum wage in 2014? Gee, some people want to get rich on the backs of their poor, beleaguered companies.

I suppose they only want to work eight hours a day, five days a week too. And I suppose they want a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs and food on the table as well.

If we all band together, we can stop all of this demanding and taking. Don’t they know how many companies will fold, especially those that need to pay their CEOs millions of dollars a year?

Working full time and living under the federal poverty level is nothing new — this is America. We’re capitalists, not socialists, as the Republican Party keeps reminding us.

Julie-Beth Adele
Long Beach

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