Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, 3rd District, has introduced a countywide minimum wage ordinance to parallel and complement the ordinance recently signed into law in Los Angeles by Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Kuehl’s motion calls for a county ordinance to be drafted that would parallel the city’s schedule of increases beginning July 1, 2016 for most minimum-wage workers, reaching $15 per hour by 2020. Beginning in 2020, the minimum wage would be indexed to a 20-year average CPI figure thereafter. Kuehl’s motion would also ensure that the county, as the area’s largest employer, would grant similar raises for the more than 5,000 minimum-wage workers on its own payroll. The motion would apply to unincorporated areas of the county where cities do not have their own minimum wage ordinances.

Kuehl’s proposal evolved after a review of four economic studies commissioned to examine a minimum-wage increase in the city of Los Angeles, one city-commissioned peer review of those studies, and a separate county-ordered review by the Los Angeles Economic Development Commission (LAEDC) of the four city studies and the potential economic impacts of enacting a similar ordinance in the county unincorporated areas.

The LAEDC report included new findings missing from earlier studies. In a random survey of more than 1,000 county business the vast majority of businesses anticipated few if any negative impacts from raising the minimum wage, and literally not a single business reported planning to close its doors, as many critics have warned. The vast majority of owners foresaw no plans to lay off workers, reduce hours or relocate. Many businesses, in fact, anticipated savings in recruitment and training costs from lower job turnover and higher productivity from a happier, more stable workforce.