There is no exemption for musicians. Say your drummer is sick and your band is performing. You'll need to hire that drummer as an employee for the 2hour gig. Or said drummer will need to pay Cali $800/yr to form an LLC and perform contract work.
Music venue? Same thing. Either hire the performers as employees or the band needs to form an LLC and pay cali $800/yr.
"Let them eat Cake" ring any bells?
Or maybe we'll instead only get corporate written propaganda pieces masquerading as citizen journalism from people pulling down a steady paycheck.
So, yes, with a small number of (mostly national/global/specialty) exceptions, there's far less news coverage requiring significant legwork and story development, especially at the local level. I live in a fairly small town and there's basically no coverage of town events since a sort of labor love small newspaper shut down a number of years ago when the publisher got ill.
The business models are tough and you see it here when every story from a paywalled source is posted and someone posts a way to bypass the paywall. (But paywalls are tough too. I subscribe to The NYT and The Economist but that's probably about my limit. And most people don't even do that much.)
This typically has the greatest impact on the least productive workers who have the most trouble finding another job, especially when the same requirements are imposed on all local employers.
Aren't the number of jobs needed more dependent on the demand for your product than the price of hiring employees? It's like the fallacy of supply side economics: people are hired to fill demand, not because it's cheap to hire them. Now more expensive labor can make your end product more expensive which can reduce demand for it and cost jobs, but that's a second order effect and should be muted if everybody is affected by the same laws at once.
The people who really get hurt are the ones competing with sweat shop slave labor in foreign countries, but most of those jobs are already gone and lazy Americans weren't willing to work 100 hour weeks for pennies anyway so competing fairly against them was Quixotic in the first place.
Nobody. You used to have two shifts, one that made a lot of money because it was peak hours and one that you could justify with a lower labor cost but not anymore. So now there's one shift and the business has shorter operating hours.
> Were they being hired unnecessarily because they were cheap, or are they going to make the remaining employees work twice as hard to cover all of the jobs? Or is stuff going to fall through the cracks.
Well yes, that's exactly what can happen. Stuff falling through the cracks has a cost. If the cost is more than the cost of hiring someone to prevent it, you do. If the cost of hiring someone goes up, the cost of the problems may now be less than what you have to pay someone to prevent it.
> Aren't the number of jobs needed more dependent on the demand for your product than the price of hiring employees?
A job exists when it creates more value than it costs to hire someone. If the value it creates stays the same and the cost to hire someone goes up, some of the jobs move to the other side of the line and disappear.
You're basically assuming that all jobs at all companies have the same margins. The high margin jobs will stay but the low margin jobs don't. "Low margin jobs suck anyway" is little consolation to the people whose alternative is even worse. And if you gave them a better alternative then they would choose it even if you hadn't prohibited the worse one.
> Now more expensive labor can make your end product more expensive which can reduce demand for it and cost jobs, but that's a second order effect and should be muted if everybody is affected by the same laws at once.
If everybody is affected by the same laws at once it makes it easier to raise prices because your competitors have to do the same thing. But raising prices still reduces overall demand.
And in many cases the competitors aren't affected because they're in other jurisdictions, and then raising prices really reduces demand in your jurisdiction because people just buy from the competitors whose prices haven't gone up.
> The people who really get hurt are the ones competing with sweat shop slave labor in foreign countries, but most of those jobs are already gone and lazy Americans weren't willing to work 100 hour weeks for pennies anyway so competing fairly against them was Quixotic in the first place.
That's just a lazy rationalization. It's the people at the margin who get hurt, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or that they don't get hurt.
I am extremely satisfied to see labor rights advocacy making a comeback.
Suppose I'm a journalist that specializes in recreational fishing for a particular region. Not only am I a journalist of what happens locally by keeping my ear to the ground, but I'm also an SME of both the types of fishing being done and also of the areas to fish and the conditions in which they bite.
How easy do you think it would be for a person like that to get a full-time paying gig somewhere with benefits? Probably very hard. But a person like that can make a decent living for himself by writing for fishing magazines, sports magazines, outdoor journals, newspapers, etc.
Not only does it limit opportunities for a writer like this, but it also diminishes the overall quality of all publications in an area. Because now he can't be that expert on one topic, he probably has to straddle a half-dozen fences in order to justify his continued employment.
I think that this is a unique situation among vocations and it's a shame that the politicians didn't listen to the people actually being affected.
If the journalist produced regular content regarding current fishing conditions they could offer the content as syndicated content to multiple publications and those would not fall under the 35 work limit.