Well most recently where I live, they changed the "non-business hours" penalty rates for workers. Basically if you make most of your money by working a night or weekend job, you can have your pay cut by half of what it currently is.

A win for corporates, and even a win for small businesses who were struggling to afford it.

But ultimately taking the money from the lower end workers and passing it up the chain instead.

Who do you think made that policy change? Who do you think would have fought against it if they both knew about it and had the means to advocate against it?

Those who couldn't fight for themselves were trodden on in that particular small policy change.

I guess I don't see this as a "huge" difference in the grand scheme of things (one locality, largely only impacts non-tip minimum wage workers outside of business hours), though the impacted individuals will certainly disagree.

I guess it seems like there are small changes that have large impacts on specific people, but that's true of all change at the margins.

That was my argument though, small changes in policy help particular groups in huge ways, but those same groups have difficulty making changes or avoiding negative ones because of their position in the system.

To put it into perspective though, that particular law affects hospitality workers the most. More than 60% of women and minorities are employed by that industry here, and so the change directly affects already marginalized individuals.

Their pay is essentially bikeshed by people way above their pay grade and stature in society, who unsurprisingly decided it wasn't that important.