Meet Mike Antonovich's Minimum Wage Hitman

LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich is opposed to a plan to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15/hour by 2020, similar to the law that the City of LA adopted a few weeks ago. It would cover employers and employees in the county’s unincorporated areas, including Altadena. 

Antonovich is entitled to espouse his views, but he is not entitled to waste taxpayers’ scarce dollars in doing so.  In late June, Antonovich allocated $55,000 to hire a corporate front group, the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), to do a so-called “study” of the impact of the minimum wage.

As I point out in my article for Huffington Post  (http://huffingtonpost.com/peterdreier/why-la-county-supervisor-_b_7745918.html), EPI is not a research or policy organization. It is funded by the restaurant industry and run by Richard Berman, a former restaurant industry executive and anti-union corporate lawyer.  EPI is run out of Berman’s Washington, DC-based lobbying and PR firm, Berman & Company, which has also created front groups for the alcohol, tobacco, agribusiness, food, and other corporate lobby groups.  Berman has even gone after the Humane Society, which opposes animal abuse, on behalf of his agribusiness clients! 

Hardly anyone takes EPI seriously as a source of impartial information. Asking EPI to conduct a ”study” of the minimum wage is like asking the National Rifle Association to look into the advantages of gun control or asking Donald Trump to examine the pros and cons of Mexican immigration.

There’s no way that Antonovich could be unaware of EPI’s role as a corporate front group or its notorious reputation for distorting the truth. It has been the subject of investigations by the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, USA Today, CBS’ 60 Minutes (which called Berman ”Dr. Evil“), CNN, the Center for Media and Democracy, and other groups.    

Moreover, another “study” isn’t necessary. The LA County Economic Development Corporation already provided the Board of Supervisors with a 72-page study of the minimum wage issue, including a survey of a thousand employers and a review of studies (conducted by legitimate research outfits) commissioned by the LA Area Chamber of Commerce, the City of LA, and the LA County Federation of Labor.

Antonovich’s misuse of $55,000 is a ploy to delay and debunk the proposal to adopt a minimum wage. And perhaps a way to get closer to Richard Berman’s friends in the restaurant, food, alcohol, and tobacco industries as he prepares to run for the state Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Carol Liu.

Peter Dreier, a Pasadena resident, is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College