#NY small businesses can’t handle minimum-wage hike right now

Pandemic restrictions have forced many employers to furlough workers, cut staffs and even close entirely. And many of those remaining now face the prospect of having to pay a higher minimum wage as of Jan. 1 — which will likely kill more jobs.

But Gov. Andrew Cuomo can delay it.

“The last thing New York’s economy needs is a state-mandated disincentive to put people back to work,” notes the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon. This sure isn’t the economic climate that lawmakers expected.

The minimum hourly wage, already $15 in the city, is to rise from $13 to $14 (7.7 percent) in Long Island and Westchester, and from $11.80 to $12.50 (5.9 percent) in the rest of the state. That’s bigger than most employers’ profit margins.

As McMahon points out, the state Division of the Budget can recommend a “temporary suspension or delay” of the hikes based on an analysis of regional economies. And unemployment and business closures are up in every region; every county and municipal government has falling tax revenues.

The numbers of jobless statewide “still remain over 1 million,” state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli revealed this week. Nearly a third of the nearly 1.1 million net jobs lost February-October, he noted, were in the leisure and hospitality sector — which will suffer again in the second virus wave.

As he’s also noted, “New York’s small businesses reported greater overall negative impacts from the pandemic, along with greater expectations of such impacts lingering for months to come, than most other states.” Nearly a third expect they’ll need to obtain financial assistance or additional capital in the next six months. Don’t hit them with a new cost instead.

It shouldn’t be too hard for the gov and his budget chief, Robert Mujica, to conclude that a wage-hike mandate now would be a deadly blow to small businesses — killing the jobs of those it aims to help.