The Absurdity of LA Mayor Karen Bass

Laws for All Except Illegal Immigrants 

Labor laws in California are strict, severe, exact, and often leaning clumsily on the side of the employee. For example, how are the assortment of laws there applied? Well. not exactly equal under the law, Charles C. Cooke explains in NRO.

Words Have Meaning

Cooke uses LA Mayor Karen Bass as a model. Mayor Bass often utters “immigrant labor,” but does she, in fact, mean illegal immigrant labor?

… a significant number of people in Los Angeles enjoy the benefits that inevitably flow from employing people who are not bound by the same archipelago of labor regulations that, in every other conceivable circumstance, figures such as Karen Bass insist are necessary for the survival of civilization. (Like cutting the grass for rich people, cleaning the houses of rich people, cooking meals for rich people, taking care of the children of rich people, etc.)

The proposed new law applies to hotels with over 60 rooms and businesses operating within LAX. The wage increase will be implemented gradually, starting with $22.50 per hour this July.

In July 2026, hotel workers would also receive a health-care credit for the first time.

The Olympic Wage

It’s hard to fathom that only 18 days ago, Mayor Bass signed the Living Wage Ordinance, which applies to hotels with over 60 rooms and businesses operating within LA.

It’s also being called the Olympic Wage—because it will boost wages for Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and workers at the city’s major hotels to $30 per hour, the highest in the nation, by 2028, when L.A. hosts the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The wage increase will be implemented gradually, starting with $22.50 per hour this July. In July 2026, hotel workers would also receive a health-care credit for the first time.

Even before she was Mayor of LA (Bass was a member of Congress), she embraced the Left’s agenda:

• the expansion of the federal minimum wage
• backed the PRO Act
• advanced measures to strengthen the power of unions against corporations.

Union Support for Mayor Bass:

• the AFL-CIO (which has given her a 100 percent rating on multiple occasions),
• the SEIU
• the UAW

During the largest education strike in US history, Bass stood with the teachers. Sounding like a stuck, gummed-up LP record, she has been demanding that employers must pay a “living wage.” All told, Bass’s approach to labor is almost French, observes Cooke.

(Bass) favors high minimum wages, strict workplace rules, robust unions, and all manner of ancillary protections for workers — and she’s willing to use the government to deliver them.

It doesn’t take much heavy lifting for NRO readers to recognize the mayor’s hypocrisy.

There are entire sectors of the economy in Los Angeles, notes Bass, that depend on immigrant labor. “This administration is waging a war against our own economy.”

Surely Bass doesn’t mean that only immigrants are doing those jobs?

Everyone … is aware that illegal immigrants are not treated by employers in the same way as everyone else. Which, inter alia, is why the internet is currently full of memes such as this one,  which, while lacking in finesse, is ultimately making the same point as Bass:

Why do the likes of Karen Bass favor certain labor laws?

“Those laws exist — and they are enforced on everyone in this country other than illegal immigrants,” writes Charles C. Cooke.

Not in favor of minimum wage laws? If they are to be law, though, shouldn’t they apply to everyone, not only to those people who have deigned to follow our laws?

Politically, it is utterly unsustainable for the most enthusiastic champions of worker protections to be gung-ho about the violation of those protections when a favored constituency is implicated by them.

If, indeed, Los Angeles cannot run properly under the patchwork of laws that are supposed to govern it, then those laws should be removed. Until that happens, they must be applied equally.

Lumpy Laws

In recent weeks, Mayor Bass has been arguing that the left is embracing laws that govern

Los Angeles equally. Well, not exactly equal, Mr. Cooke observes.

Do those who favor a secure border, an orderly immigration system, and the swift deportation of illegal aliens motivated, as accused, by animus?  Is there a debate over what is 2^nd class? What does illegal mean to most Americans?

But is that not, in fact, a perfect description of the approach of Karen Bass, who apparently envisions a city in which some of the jobs are done by her friends at a minimum of $30 per hour plus benefits, and the rest are taken care of by the faceless “immigrant labor,” which does not deserve to benefit from such rules, and cannot?