With rapidly rising labor costs, Los Angeles City Hall better be ready to cut, cut, cut

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass delivers the State of the City address to city council members and invited guests at Los Angeles City Hall on Monday, April 15, 2024. The not-unexpected — inevitable, in fact — side effects of paying the estimable burger-flippers at McDonald’s in California at least $20 an hour are making themselves known, and very quickly.

Such, apparently, is the logic within Los Angeles City Hall, which this month announced the coming fiscal effects of a series of pay raises negotiated with various unions that will go to about 33,000 city workers. But that $20 level is not going to be the floor for long. The city’s administrative officer, Matt Szabo, wrote in a 40-page analysis to Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council that the salary agreements would add $316 million to the city budget within the next fiscal year. But that number will reach more than $1 billion annually by 2028, he said.The mayor and council members, who negotiated the raises with a coalition of various unions, say that workers deserve to be adequately compensated, which no one would argue with, as such.

One place the money simply will have to come from in order to avoid outrageous hikes in fees and taxes is in the savings that will come from not filling thousands of currently vacant jobs. Szabo has called for the elimination of 1,974 city positions, some of which have gone unfilled for years. He points out that the money thus saved will be needed not only to compensate the civilian workers in question — but for the separate deal to raise the pay of police officers: $1 billion over four years.

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