Nancy Pelosi wants you to pay a $10.10 minimum wage. Herself, not so much.

Posted by Jack Kemp on March 8, 2013 at 4:43pm

Jack E. Kemp

The Washington Times now reports that "Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that recent Wall Street gains mean one sure thing: The minimum wage should be hike to $10.10 per hour."

Well, that sounds generous of Nancy Pelosi.  But some of our readers may recall a 2006 piece at American Thinker which stated:

As Peter Schweizer notes in his best-selling expose of liberal hypocrisy, "Do As I Say (Not As I Do)," part of the fortune of this defender of the working man is a Napa Valley vineyard worth $25 million that she owns with her husband. The vineyard produces expensive grapes for high-end wines. Napa grapes bring up to $4,000 a ton compared with $300 a ton for, say, San Joaquin grapes.

But Pelosi, winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only nonunion workers and sells these grapes to nonunion wineries. ...

Which makes Pelosi's steadfast opposition to any attempts to enhance border security and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. all the more interesting since she seems to be among those rich employers who financially benefit from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor. ...

The source book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do), also has this quote on pages 150-151:

The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive, fifty-room hotel and resort in Napa, California. Auberge du Soleil features a world-class French restaurant, a luxury spa, and beautiful rooms with cottages, all in the ambience of Provence...The hotel resort has more than fifty rooms and boasts more than 250 employees - but it is a strictly nonunion shop. The dishwashers, maid staff, busboys, and bellboys (many of them Hispanic immigrants) might be targeted in membership drives by HERE (note: an AFL-CIO union), but at Auberge they will have to face management alone.

[snip]

... the Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti. ... The chain boasts sixteen restaurants in five states and has more than nine hundred employees. ... But work there ... and you can't get a union card. As with Auberge du Soleil, at Piatti the Pelosis' commitment to organized labor ends at the front door.

Author Peter Schweizer also emphasizes that because many of the Pelosis' workers are immigrants, they are the most likely to have lower wages.  The book did not specify whether these employees included illegal aliens; however, there is a possibility of that.  Ironically, Schweizer also points out that none of the unions Nancy Pelosi supports would hold a conference at her hotel because of the non-union labor.

It appears that Ms. Pelosi could easily be paying less than the legal minimum wage to workers who have, shall we say, problems with either documenting their status or understanding labor laws written in English or even another language.  Thus, Pelosi possibly could not be impacted by a rise in the minimum wage the way McDonald's -- or McDonald's employees -- would be.  By the way, a hamburger with "pomme frites" (French fries) at The Bistro Bar at Pelosi's Auberge du Soleil hotel is $19.

It also appears that Nancy Pelosi feels (notice I didn't say "thinks") that expenses added to employers by ObamaCare, impacting both hiring and firing, make for a mere trifle that can be easily absorbed with no problem -- no problem for her, that is.

Well, Al Gore can drop by her hotel with his huge check from Qatar, and they can share a glass of wine from her vineyard and sing "Look for the Union Label," as Al said his mother used to sing to him (at age 27).  They can both then look for the union label -- but they won't find it.