Michael Cameron senior lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Waikato wrote an interesting piece on his excellent blog “Sex, Drugs and Economics.” The Los Angeles city council voted in May to raise the city’s minimum wage from $9 to $15 per hour. Initially trade unions fought hard for the increase in the minimum wage but they now want a change to the law that would exempt unionised firms from the new proposals – trade unions wanting lower wages? The Economist said:
Indeed, by exempting unionised businesses from the minimum wage, unions are creating more incentives for employers to favour unionised workers over the non-unionised sort. Such exemptions strengthen their power. This is useful because for all the effort unions throw at raising the minimum wage, laws for better pay have an awkward habit of undermining union clout. Britain’s minimum-wage law in 1998, for example, precipitated a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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