Hot Air posted an article today about the recent fight in California to pass an increase in the minimum wage. Unions and business owners are supporting the increase. Each have their own reasons.

Under the new law, hotels that are unionized don’t have to increase their wages. Hotels that are open shops have to follow the law and increase wages. So a union hotel employee who pays $56.50 every month for membership in the hotel workers union does not get a raise, while his non-union equivalent gets a pay raise.

The article concludes:

The raison d’etre of unions is supposedly to arrange better conditions, compensation and benefits for their members, so why they would agree to that deal doesn’t jump out at you. But the reality is that not all of the hotels are unionized. The ones who run open shops fall under the new arrangement and have to pay their workers significantly higher wages. So how do they get out of this sudden spike in labor costs which could put them at a disadvantage with their competitors? (Cue the Jeopardy music…)

They can just unionize their work force.

It’s really a genius maneuver if you think about it. Getting a raise for some of the workers in the city who already belong to your union doesn’t really translate into that much more money in dues because they only collect a small percentage of the increase. But if you can suddenly enlist the workers at a whole raft of new businesses into your organization you get a piece of all their paychecks. It’s the perfect plan, really.

Of course, the people who get left out in the cold are the actual members of the union, particularly once they find out what’s going on. But that was never the real objective of the union in modern times anyway. What’s critical is enlisting as much of the workforce as possible and keeping the cash flowing in so they can continue to fund the political campaigns of Democrats.

It pays to read laws carefully and look at who is supporting them. In this case, those in the unions who have worked to pass the law assumed that they would gain by its passage. Those in the upper levels of the union had another idea. They supported a law that would cost union shops less while potentially increasing the number of union shops. This is only one example of the damage that the alliance of unions and politicians can do.