Stephanie March – top foodie at Minneapolis / Saint Paul magazine – lays into Mayor Hodges and the unbending cynicism of her dismissal of a “tip credit” (or lower minimum wage for tipped employees).
One of many potential pullquotes:
The fact that you would equate tipping with slavery, one of the most abhorrent systems in human history, to court outrage and support your cause, is beyond disgusting to me. To compare today’s restaurant owners with those in the past who didn’t comprehend humanity just shows that you still really, really don’t get it. I defy you to find a more giving industry, name another that regularly shows up at all the fundraisers, gives gift cards for silent auctions, allows start up business to pop-up in their locations so that the employees can one day become owners too. It seems that you desperately need this to be seen as an US vs. THEM situation, you are promoting division. When you continually refer to solutions proposed by the small businesses that are trying to find a way to survive this massive increase as “compromise” complete with quotes, you belittle them, you snidely create around them an aura that they are no different than McDonald’s. Your locally grown independent restaurants, your constituents who most likely started out as servers and cooks, don’t want to see their employees suffer, especially in this tight labor market. It benefits no one. They understand that change is needed in this fluctuating service landscape, but you who don’t understand the business or the culture, are not the one to mandate it.
While Ms. March is correct on the moral and ethical plane, she’s wrong in a practical sense; in a one-party town, Hodges may as well be absolute royalty. In a city full of restauranteurs who vote DFL, this is what you get.
They are working hard to come up with creative solutions at Pathway to $15, a coalition that wants to support owners and all service employees. But they tell me they feel largely unheard by you, that your listening sessions are just pandering, that your drive to put us into this experiment with bigger cities like Seattle and San Francisco is what is most important to you. I dare you to prove us wrong.
Fearless prediction: It will never happen. By the time her policies come home to roost, she’ll be on to Congress / a state executive branch staff job / a lobbying gig / a plush non-profit job. It’s not her problem.
Not to take anything away from Ms. March, but Hodges doesn’t care any more about restaurant employees than she does about the owners’ bottom lines.
Breaking news. Wendy’s announces plans for self ordering kiosks at 1000 locations. But this has absolutely nothing to do with the economics of the restaurant industry. It’s those greedy capitalists who don’t want to pay a living wage. Note to Mayor Hodges. The minimum wage is still zero.
What Betsy should do is follow Bill Gates lead
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/tech/2017/02/20/bill-gates-thinks-robots-should-pay-taxes-like-rest-us/98072998/
and tax robots and kiosks!
Think what a non-workers paradise she could make out of Mpls!
The problem is that for these people they view the money as a zero sum game, there is only X amount of dollars that could ever be taken in by this business and if I don’t get my ‘fair share’ its going to the evil owner. Somebody get these people a intro to economics book. Shit this isn’t even economics 101, its econmics for dummies.
POD for Betsy and her ilk “economics” is a fluid social construct a malleable as race or gender – it is whatever they say it is today
Empty headed Betsy and her idiot husband, are career libidiot government stooges.
It hurts to think about. How can such dumb people be running our city… oh wait it actually kind of makes sense now
They know they’re liberal. What they don’t know is they’re misguided.
I came across a fairly typical lefty explanation of why creating a minimum wage is so good for the economy. It puts more money in the pockets of the workers, who of course go out and spend it, leading to increased demand, stimulating the economy and everyone wins. Call it trickle up economics. Keynesian multiplier and all that. Of course, why not make the minimum wage a hundred bucks an hour? They don’t seem to have heard about inflation or what is happening in Venezuela
Golfdoc, these people can’t distinguish the difference between legal and illegal immigration. Expecting them to understand the cost/benefit analysis of a minimum wage is like trying to teach algebra to cows.
POD,
At least cows would have a chance of learning something.
To me it’s rather simple, this is the job I offer and this is the compensation I’m willing to pay you for the work. Don’t take the job if that is unacceptable to you, go elsewhere.
It’s government EXTORTION for them to dictate the employer/employee contract!
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It’s funny how the elected buffoons keep giving themselves pay raises without voter approval, yet they dictate to their constituents how much they should pay their employees. Classic!
“What Betsy should do is follow Bill Gates lead”
Bill Gates ought to know. After all, he was collecting a “CPU tax” in the 1990s.
Golfdoc wrote:
I came across a fairly typical lefty explanation of why creating a minimum wage is so good for the economy. It puts more money in the pockets of the workers, who of course go out and spend it, leading to increased demand, stimulating the economy and everyone wins.
This wrong because it disregards the value the worker adds with her labor. If the worker adds less than $15 per hour of value, and she is paid $15, she consumes more wealth than she creates.
In practice, the firm increases prices until the worker produces $15 per hour (plus a small profit). Increasing prices, however, decreases demand, so you need fewer workers at the new demand level.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the firm is making immense profits on minimum wage labor, enough that it can still make a small profit w/o increasing prices while it pays the worker at the new $15/hr wage.
Then you have a problem because the value of the company was based on those immense profits, and now that they are not immense, the stock price dives.
MP, your point is well made. Also if a minimum wage worker produces at a level above expectations and delivers quality in his/her work it’s likely an employer will desire to increase his pay grade and area of responsibilities lest he loose that individual to a competitor. March doesn’t get the notion of merit, doubtful Hodges gets it either.
This is why Democrats don’t get elected. They are so certain of their own omniscience they are unwilling to listen.
EI, that is possibly the most well thought out, coherent statement you have ever made on SiTD
it has begun
http://www.dailywire.com/news/13906/remember-when-leftists-wanted-15-minimum-wage-fast-aaron-bandler
This is so easily explained by one phrase: Unless it is enforced at gunpoint, collectivism will always fail because it is antithetical to the most basic human instinct: self preservation.
Restaurants exist to make money, not provide jobs. Leftists/collectivists feel the employee reigns supreme over the bottom line. They would confiscate the employers’ wealth (at gunpoint if they had their druthers) to redistribute to the employee. Eventually the employer decides it’s not worth it and either raises prices (driving down growth/customer demand), changes business practices (automation – bye bye employees) or shuts down (Atlas Shrugged).
I think if Hillary had gotten elected we would have had a “Who is John Galt” movement with small and large businesses giving her the middle finger. Fortunately this is just speculation.