New York’s new $15 minimum wage and mandatory leave benefits – dutifully parroted by Minneapolis and Saint Paul – are already having…
…well, exactly the effect conservatives predicted:
In explaining his decision to close following 28 years of high-volume business, owner Charles Milite told the New York Post, “The times have changed in our industry. The rents are very high and now the minimum wage is going up and we have a huge number of employees.”
Milite employs about 150 people at his breakfast, lunch, and dinner operation, which also puts him over the Affordable Care Act’s costly mandate that establishments with 50 or more employees provide health insurance.
The Coffee Shop is part of The Gotham City Restaurant Group, which also owns Flats Fix, the former employer of socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The 28-year-old Democratic congressional candidate recently told The New York Times that many of her fellow restaurant workers were uninsured, inspiring her to run for office.
And the inevitable end result?
Eventually, minimum wage laws and other prohibitive regulations will cause the world-renowned restaurant life in cities like New York, DC, and San Francisco to cease to exist. The staff skill levels will drop, the number of servers and bartenders will never be enough, and the only survivors will be fast-casual chains with low overhead and deep pockets.
New York’s new look will be vacant storefronts between an occasional Pret-a-Manger or the public restroom formerly known as Starbucks. But don’t worry. That charming, downtown studio apartment will still run about $5,000 per month for the privilege of proximity to all that culture.
Minneapolis and Saint Paul’s efforts to be little New Yorks will no doubt pay off – in all the wrong ways.
MBerg almost had me worried that every resident would starve to death because restaurants in Minneapolis paid people something closer to a living wage, and we’d have to commute out to greater MN to find the abundant, high-paying jobs.
Emery, if it wasn’t for food stamps and the like, a lot of people in big cities that price labor out of the market WOULD be starving.
The question here is why liberals hate the poor so much, and question #2 is how the left keeps the votes of the poor when their programs do so much to keep them in poverty and subject to horrendous crime rates.
BB
question #2: “how the left keeps…”
answer: Public schools
The first time (1998) I heard a recent HS graduate tell me that the human race was a virus infecting this planet I asked where they got that idea, they said they learned it in science class. I’ve heard this a few times since then.
Its not going to be difficult to convince them that large segments of the population need to be culled to save the planet.
The effects of a minimum wage are seen on the margins. People with fewer work skills, poor work habits, physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and ex cons will not be able to compete with other workers by asking for less money.
Raise the minimum wage to a “living wage” level & you won’t see teenagers in the workforce. Why pay some kid who has never learned good habits $15/hr, when for that wage you can hire an adult with a proven work record?
The children of the wealthy and the upper middle class are allowed to compete for “starter jobs” on a cost basis. They can afford to apply for jobs as unpaid interns, because the parents will foot the bill for their child’s living expenses & whatever else they need.
Poor and lower middle class kids will no longer be able to get a summer job to buy a car or to help pay college expenses.
The bourgeois will always use public policy to further their class ambitions. And tell you that it is good for “society.”
You’ll see it on the margins, and then you see it in the main distribution. Folks that don’t learn good work habits in their first job tend not to have them for the next job, and we can see that in inner cities where you have generations of people who have never held down a job. Their great-grandparents, however, somehow managed to find productive work and often even worked in the trades and professions.
Sad, sad, sad to watch.
We have taken most of the high paying, heavy manufacturing jobs from Northern, leftist dominated states.
All that’s left is service and tech.
This mandatory minimum will have low IQ, uneducated, unskilled service workers out on the street within months…we don’t want them jumping on the grey dog headed South.
Y’all can keep the burger flipping jobs for good; create new programs to feed, clothe and house them. And keep the tech until millennials mature enough to become conservatives.
PB nailed it. The communists and progressives knew that if they infiltrated and took over the public education system, their work would be much easier a couple generations down the road.
I went to a private school, however I do not recall ANY political indoctrination by any of my social studies or science teachers. I do know my 10th grade biology teacher was a crunchy granola environmentalist in her private life who drove a Volvo 240 wagon, but not once did I ever hear her talk about the evils of big oil or logging or cars.
I’m sure the kids in my alma mater nowadays are absolutely marinated in political activism disguised as learning all day, every day.
My kids go to a private Catholic school. There is some political indoctrination, but not nearly as much as in the public schools. My 16yo daughter has thus far been mostly resistant to it, with the exception of becoming an LGBTQ advocate and her friends bashing Trump because Trump is Trump.
The “living wage” assumes only people who support whole families should have jobs, if you take advocates at their word. It functions more like another political tool to control the economic lives of poor people: well intentioned and plausible on the surface, behaves like manacles and a collar.
If you’re supporting kids flipping burgers, you’re trying, but still not getting it right.
Getting it right:
Train; establish competence; negotiate compensation commensurate with competence; get married; have kids.
Works Every. Time.
My kids have never worked for minimum wage. Even my oldest’s first job as a cashier at Target paid $2 more an hour than minimum wage to start. I’m pretty sure the fast food places aren’t paying minimum wage – they’ve long had to compete with other entry level employers. That’s why the focus has shifted to “the fight for $15” instead of “minimum wage”. (The kiosks appearing at McDonald’s are in part due to the increased wage, but probably have more to do with how hard it is to get people to work for them.)
My youngest daughter, btw, worked in Europe for two years, and in the time-honored European tradition, was paid in cash at the end of the day, “off the books”, by all three of her employers, thanks to the confiscatory EU taxation policies. To paraphrase Dr. Malcolm, “Business finds a way.”
NW, these laws are passed to help the kids of people like Emery. But all it does, is ensure that kids of people like Emery live lives of unskilled, uneducated slackers…generation after generation.
There is a reason that only 43% of working age adults in America pay income taxes. The reason is people like Emery, and the leftists in power that subsidize and encourage abject poverty and ignorance.
But all it does, is ensure that kids of people like Emery live lives of unskilled, uneducated slackers…generation after generation.
…who are more likely to vote Dem. And the Dems know it, so they scream bloody murder (and now get violent) if anyone tries to derail their train to poverty/slavery.
There is a reason that only 43% of working age adults in America pay income taxes. The reason is people like Emery, and the leftists in power that subsidize and encourage abject poverty and ignorance.
See above.