A Stitch in Haste

Back in April I blogged about an obnoxious legislative maneuver to keep Wal-Mart out of Maryland:

Lawmakers said they did not set out to single out Wal-Mart when they drafted a bill requiring organizations with more than 10,000 employees to spend at least 8 percent of their payroll on health benefits — or put the money directly into the state's health program for the poor.

Guess how many employers there were in Maryland with more than 10,000 employees.

Fortunately Maryland's governor vetoed the act — see my follow-up post.

A Wal-Mart executive ended the incident with an prescient warning:

Next time around ... it might not be 10,000 employees, it might be 200. Then you are talking about a very different scenario that involves everyone in the business community, not just Wal-Mart...

In New York City the number turned out not to be 200, but 35. The City Council is considering a bill that would require any grocery store (not all employers, mind you, but just grocery stores) with more than 35 employees (I guess bodega workers don't need health care) to offer some gobbledygook called the "prevailing rate" for healthcare (PDF — 4 pages):

Int. 468-A will require employers in the City's grocery and food retail industries to provide health care to their employees, thereby stemming the growing trend of not offering such coverage. The legislation will also [sic!] apply to so-called "big box" stores, such as Wal-Mart, which sell groceries.
...
Requiring supermarkets to spend the industry's prevailing amount on health care is a pro-business response [sic!] that protects responsible employers as well as the taxpayers of our City.

The "prevailing rate" is of course currently determined by unionized supermarket chains.

Just as in Maryland, how many potential employers might be contemplating setting up shop in New York City, would "also" qualify as grocery stores under the bill, would employ more than 35 workers and, based on worker preferences, not offer the "prevailing rate" of healthcare benefits?

I suspect the answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of "one."

I called the Maryland proposal a bill of attainder, and I think the term is warranted in New York as well.

Is it really better to be unemployed full-time than to be employed part-time at Wal-Mart, even with little or no health care coverage?

Is it really in the interests of all New Yorkers (as opposed to a politically favored constituency) to have less retail competition, and with it higher prices, especially for groceries (the prices of which are far more important to the poor than to the wealthy)?

Is it really necessary for local hack activist politicians to invent problems just so they can "cure" them?

What kind of sick, twisted politicking is this, where legal businesses are declared persona non grata, where preventing the creation of new jobs is celebrated as "worker empowerment," where employees are de facto unionized against their will, and where constituents are told that paying higher prices is in their best interests?

Sheer madness.

More thoughts from Ryan Sager and Out of Control. Also, Eclectic Econoclast notes that Target, which does not sell groceries and would therefore be exempt from this bill of attainder, is launching an ad blitz to capitalize on the City Council's anti-Wal-Mart bias.