Posted on 05/25/2015 6:50:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
If you love In-N-Out burgers and care about the workers who flip your burgers, then you should support a minimum wage of $0.
Deep down, I know you’re tired of seeing actors jump up and down for TV cameras while waving professional signs that read: “McGreedy! McStingy! McPoverty!” or “McShame. McDonald’s. Raise That Wage.”
You weren’t born yesterday. You doubt that these protestors come up with these slogans on their own or fashion them into makeshift signs with their own cardboard, sticks and markers. You suspect they were given signs and paid to wave them. Indeed, in recent protests, 84% of McDonald's "protesters" were not real McDonald's employees but paid and trained professional rioters.
Professional rioters pout and shout in public for a one-time cash payment—not a cause. Since rioters are not entrepreneurs, they do not empathize with the challenges of competing in the restaurant business where profit margins hover at 4%. Nor do they understand the feat of turning a profit while relying on a staff of over-paid and inexperienced high school students.
Greed clouds the intellect of many professional wage protesters. For, reason as well as the Fourth Amendment tell us that every American business owner has a natural right to spend their private property (or cash) on employee wages as they see fit.
Los Angeles’ current minimum wage is above the Federal minimum of $7.25. Last week, the Los Angeles city council voted to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. Los Angeles is a city of nearly 19 million. According to TIME, a maximum of 800,000 people—or about four percent of the city’s population—will benefit.
Besides “benefiting” up to 800,000 people, the wage hike will eventually hurt an untold number of people. Prepare to see (and smell) more wrinkly clothing and shaggy hair when Los Angelenos delay trips to the dry cleaners and barber.
Joking aside, we have recent a case study of what happens when we jack up the minimum wage. After the city of Seattle, Washington raised its minimum wage to $15, Forbes reported: “Restaurants are closing at higher than normal rates.”
On the national level, six years after the “end” of the Great Recession, wages are still anemic. In April, hourly wages rose 0.1 percent, prompting the New York Times to run a story in May about how “the growth in jobs failed to translate, once again, into any significant improvement in pay.” So, even if you believe the government’s data on job increases, there is no way to avoid the reality that wages are stagnant. Across America, employers are keeping wages low in order to eek out a profit.
So far, no one has solved this riddle: how do you create MORE jobs while forcing employers to raise wages by 107%, from $7.25 to $15?
Seattle tried, without luck. Now Los Angeles is trying. But Bank of America just surveyed their small business owners and found that only 21 percent have experienced full economic recovery over the past six years. Retailers in particular are fighting for the pecuniary crumbs of price-conscious American consumers. Indeed, my Millennial peers are so frugal that Whole Foods is rolling out a cheaper version of its grocery brand in a frantic attempt to get us to even walk through their doors.
Our overall economy is floundering and no amount of arbitrary lawmaking will spur wage growth. We need organic growth, which comes from small businesses generating profits that are sizable enough to justify expanding, hiring and increasing benefits.
Entrepreneurs have and will respond to mandatory wage minimums by moving their companies; raising prices; reducing staff; deferring expansion plans; or by reducing the quantity and quality of their services.
You are left with two choices. You can enjoy tapping your foot in line at your favorite burger joint as you wait for that cheeseburger, soda and fries that used to take three minutes and now takes 15 due to staff reductions. You can accept mediocrity as the new reality of American retail service. Or, you can speak up in defense of a $0 minimum wage and an America where bureaucrats do not force entrepreneurs to over-pay burger flippers. It’s a juicy choice to ponder as you grill out on Memorial Day.
“If you love In-N-Out burgers and care about the workers who flip your burgers, then you should support a minimum wage of $0.”
He lost me there. In-N-Out is not your typical hamburger joint as he talks about in the article.
(1) US workers didn't have to compete with invader (legal and illegal) labor
(2) there were tariffs to protect the US labor market from unfair overseas competition and
(3) all of those rules, regulations, and taxes that supress individual and small business would disappear.
ahahab UNION RIGHTS??
that may be the dumbest protest “sign” i have EVER SEEN
the protestor may not be of a very advanced age i’m thinking. 17 years old.. tops??
Thank you.
Shameful.
Restaurants will not completely disappear, but they will change. There will be fewer restaurants and they will be more automated. The ones that survive will have much longer lines that never end, so employees will always be busy and providing a return on that $15/hour wage. Employees will also to a growing extent be family members of the owner - in many cases a Korean or other Asian extended family will provide the entire staffing for restaurants that used to offer jobs to local teens.
Laws have consequences, and no one will win from this terrible law, except for the professional racists who will expand their captive audience by pricing them out of a job.
$15 per hour is not enough. Clearly, ignorant and unskilled workers like the one with the sign should not be allowed to have jobs. That’s what EBT cards are for.
Raise the minimum wage to $25 per hour, and get the unskilled riff-raff out of the labor force! /sarc
At least I think I’m being sarcastic. The more I think about it, there is some merit in that idea. Oh, wait! That is how they do it in France.
So many places around here there's one person actually doing the work and a few others mostly in their way.
A relative’s job involves working with poverty level parents of young children. She would gladly pay many of those people not to work. The thought of them driving a truck on the roads we use or caring for her loved ones in the nursing home strikes terror in her heart.
They really can be that stupid and hopelessly incompetent.
You don't. That's the bottom line.
How many blacks do you think will get the $15/hr jobs? I’ll bet the Latino’s will get all or most of them. Especially if we get millions with work cards via executive order.
Yeah, me too. I thought this was about In N Out being an enlightened company who chooses to pay its workers higher wages for better performance and staff retention, without government meddling.
Even in places where there has been no minimum wage increase... this campaign is already causing problems. Low skilled people and/or people just entering the workforce now feel like they are not being treated fairly and they deserve more. It is making it more difficult for small businesses to find and keep employees and the ones that they do have are harder to control and less willing to do a good job, because they have an entitlement mentality.
This is just another way that the left is insidiously destroying our country.
From Walter William’s column last week:
The minimum wage law and other labor regulations have cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Put yourself in the place of an employer, and ask: If I must pay $7.25 an hour — plus mandated fringes, such as Social Security and workers’ compensation — would it pay me to hire a worker who is so unfortunate as to possess skills that enable him to produce only $5 worth of value per hour? Most employers view that as a losing economic proposition. Thus, the minimum wage law discriminates against the employment of low-skilled workers, who are most often youths — particularly black youths.
The little bit of money a teenager can earn through after-school, weekend and summer employment is not nearly so important as the other things he gains from early work experiences. He acquires skills and develops good work habits, such as being prompt, following orders and respecting supervisors. In addition, there are the self-respect and pride that a youngster gains from being financially semi-independent. All of these gains from early work experiences are important for any teen but are even more important for black teens. If black teens are going to learn anything that will make them a more valuable employee in the future, they aren’t going to learn it from their rotten schools, their dysfunctional families or their crime-ridden neighborhoods. They must learn it on the job.
You can bet two things. There won’t be a great number of $15/hr fast food jobs, but what few there are will make fast food unaffordable for the very people screaming for the $15 min wage.
Sorry, but this nonsense about minimum wage driving restaurants out of business needs to be confronted.
Anybody who’s been thru Econ 101 knows that the main time a rise in costs leads to a massive wave of business closings is when the cost is imposed unevenly. IOW, if restaurants with names from A to L had to pay the higher wage, but restaurants with names from M to Z did not, then those with the names earlier in the alphabet would go out of business at a much higher rate.
If costs are imposed on an industry evenly, the primary economic effect is a rise in prices that is at least enough to cover the increase in costs. All businesses are still on an even competitive basis, with none getting a competitive edge from the change.
Now, the higher prices will lead, at least initially, to a drop in total sales for the industry, which will no doubt drive some of the less efficient operations out. But in most cases people will gripe for a bit and then return to their previous purchasing habits.
Restaurants close to the edge of the political boundary will have a competitive disadvantage compared to the place just across the line not forced to pay the higher wage, but that’s a relatively small effect.
Witness what happens to airlines every time there’s a spike in fuel prices. The main effect is that ticket prices go up. Or what’s happened to fast food burger prices over the last couple years. Beef prices went up, and so did all the burger prices. Nobody went out of business specifically because the price of their raw materials went up. Labor is a cost no different than beef or fuel, in this regard.
Restaurants aren’t all that price sensitive as an industry anyway, look at the enormous range of prices for a dinner. <$10 to $200+. For higher end restaurants, the cost of labor is a smaller percentage of their sales, so they are less affected than the low-rent places.
There are lots of good reasons to oppose a minimum wage, but that it will drive lots of restaurants out of business isn’t one of them.
Easy - union contracts are tied to the minimum wage, so that means mandatory salary increases for union workers all over the city.
Which means more union dues will be collected.
Which means larger contributions will go to the Democratic Party.
Which means the Democratic Party will be staffing up with more professional activists and community organizers...IOW, the very people who were pushing so hard for the minimum wage increase.
See how easy this is?
Next lesson will be on how cities try to import as many homeless people as possible, so they can shake down downtown businesses for more contributions...to hire professional activists and community organizers to "tackle" the problems. :)
And as an aside, I added up the cost for one of my loaded cheeseburgers with the works:
1.18 beef
.31 bun
.18 cheddar cheese
.02 onion
.02 pickle
.06 tomato
.06 lettuce
.02 mayo
.02 mustard
.02 ketchup
Total cost, $1.89 and 8 minutes time. They're so good I had one for breakfast! [I'll have the oatmeal for lunch]
Welfare pays $30.00 an hour don’t ya think minimum wage should match? /sarc
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