It's no wonder.........................
Posted on 07/19/2017 8:49:16 AM PDT by PPSman
Restaurants in Seattle are showing an increase in hygiene violations as the minimum wage climbs.
From the paper Minimum Wage and Restaurant Hygiene Violation: Evidence from Food Establishments in Seattle by Subir K. Chakrabarti, Srikant Devaraj and Pankaj C. Patel (my highlight):
(Excerpt) Read more at economicpolicyjournal.com ...
It's no wonder.........................
If you cannot afford to pay someone to mop the floors and clean the restrooms then they don’t get cleaned.
Ok - why?
As much as I disagree with SJWs demanding increases in the MW, I’m having difficulty correlating the MW rise with “hygiene violations”. Seems counter-intuitive...
Health violations, safety violations - these are the natural and expected result in artificially raising labor costs beyond what the market has already valued them at. Marry them with a modest price increase, and hopefully you survive.
But back of the house is one of the easiest to cut corners for immediate restoration of the bottom line - axe out 30 hours which would have been spent cleaning the kitchen and walk in, that's nearly enough to cover the extra labor costs. And it will almost always work for the first few weeks with no detriment and thus gets fixed in place - only to have the situation get progressively worse as materials which would have been cleaned out under the old system are left to rot.
Lol
Unintended Consequences...
Easy to explain. Maintaining hygiene costs money. You need to pay for someone to clean and cleaning materials.
Knowing a few restaurant owners, when faced with a significant cost increase, they will simply cut some staff, and divide extra work among remaining staff.
Now Ramone has the extra jobs of handling bathroom cleaning, as well as dishes and laundry. He’s not happy about it.
Whatever government entity performs checks for hygiene/cleanliness in Seattle, will not be allowed to shut them down, or won’t report them at all, because it would expose a big repercussion from the insanity of forcing minimum wages on companies. Also, shutting them down would result on jobs losses, which would be a much bigger consequence, and democrats won’t want to shine light on their stupidity on the minimum wage.
That makes perfect sense - thanks.
Lol
I was in outside sales for a national chemical company. Before I bought a fax machine I had to go in once a day to turn in orders. We had a weekly Wednesday afternoon meeting. Not long after I was hired at our weekly meeting we were told by the manager that he was getting rid of the cleaning crew and that since there was 12 of us that we were going to take turns cleaning the bathroom.
I was the only one that stood up and said.....I wasn’t hired to clean the bathroom. I’m not cleaning the bathroom. If you let the cleaning crew go and the bathrooms need cleaned I suggest you do it since it was your decision, not mine, and you are here all day anyway.
No one else said a word. I was shocked that they were so gutless.
So who ended up cleaning the bathrooms?
From the research paper:
“Faced with an increase in real minimum wage, restaurants could lay off staff and/or cut their hours; resulting in higher task demands on the continuing staff. These increased task demands could lower hygiene levels in the food establishments and could have a significant impact on public health. While hygiene levels may not exacerbate to levels where health authorities close down the restaurant, an increase in less severe hygiene violations could affect public health. “
"...No one else said a word..."
Don’t leave us hanging and wondering how the story ends!
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