A Birmingham, MI upscale restaurant signs up in support of paying a “living wage” to FOH employees…
It’s far from a trend here in the upper Midwest, but the article contains some interesting quotes and comments.
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An interesting article about the struggles of independent restaurants in Berkeley that relates to this thread. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2019/10/01/berkeleys-small-food-business-owners-get-creative-to-make-ends-meet-but-is-it-enough-to-compete-with-chains
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That was a welcome insight. I believe some of these things are unique to the BA, but similar problems are happening everywhere.
I personally prefer tip-free, but take exception to the “everyone is the same” concept. Where is the motivation to excel? There needs to be a way for the high achievers to be recognized.
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So true.
LOL, this is well beyond the scope of HO, but it’s past time for someone to say it: FOH with this witless, fact-free, von Mises gobbeldygook. This isn’t even a libertarian’s gloss on economics - that would be my post, which points out that in a free labor market, firms that don’t pay workers a high enough wage to meet their needs have to deal with the real business consequences of those workers leaving. This is just a take from a perspective that wants poor people to suffer no matter what the mechanism.
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Ah, but who decides what is a valid need? I need to make my boat payment.
My previous point was not about how to pay workers per se. It is the false (in my opinion) concept that all workers are the same. They are not? How then to recognize the high achievers? The ones who, in the context of FoH, generate repeat business. How to recognize the line cook who has short ticket times and a low return rate? To your point about workers moving on, the ones most likely to move on are the ones a business can least afford to lose. I’m making assumptions of course as it has been a long time since I lived in the Bay area, but my perception is that the dominant politics of the area seem to be counter-productive at the level of tactical personnel management. Not all people are equal. I’m not talking about race, gender, or ethnicity. I’m talking about flat-out simple productivity. Productivity needs to be rewarded. To do otherwise leads to the “troubling trend for restaurants in San Fran(cisco).”
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This is so, so deeply stupid. The whole point is that the person entering into an agreement to supply their own labor in exchange for a firm’s money is the one who decides whether that money is of a sufficient amount to meet their own needs. If it isn’t, THEY WILL LEAVE, just like a restaurant’s equipment vendor will decline to sell them that $10000 rangetop for $700, or their produce vendor will decline to supply them with $1/pound tomatoes at the owner’s preferred price of $.05/pound. Their employer can piss and moan all they want about this tragic state of affairs, but a) pissing and moaning will not actually help them deal with the cold realities of doing business in a free market, b) there’s no reason to be especially sympathetic to the plight of someone whose grievance is the ridiculous “all my production inputs - including labor - should come at a price that’s not what the market dictates, but rather at a price that happens to be maximally convenient for my burger-flipping franchise.”
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Precisely my point. The links above suggest that the problem is solved by increasing minimum wage with the clear statement that all workers are worth the same. All workers are NOT worth the same. Some are better than others and should be compensated accordingly.
We can talk about compensation. That may not be money. Some people want time off, or schedule flexibility, or benefits, or a set schedule they can plan around. Growth potential. Training. Government CAN NOT replace good management with minimum wage regulation. A problem in San Fransisco is the belief that a few regulations will fix all problems. People don’t operate that way. If you box business owners into a corner you’ll lose the good workers, the good managers (managers are workers also), and the good business owners.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
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At the end of the day what is lacking in SF is empathy for small business owners. They tend to get hammered by the cudgels imposed in the efforts to redistribute wealth and get businesses to “pay their fare share”. Having empathy for workers is more virtuous in SF than empathy for struggling small business people. In my opinion perhaps what is needed is slightly less wealth redistribution and more empathy redistribution. I suppose I will get hammered for saying this (“you don’t care about the poor, right-winger etc”), but that’s my opinion.
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I agree. All the talk of minimum wage doesn’t apply to the small business owner who puts up savings and equity and work stunningly long hours. That s/he is working for the equivalent of a very few dollars an hour why taking huge personal risk doesn’t seem to matter.
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“Small” is the nub of the matter, because the mainstream media and too many gub’mint pinheads have no real idea what it takes in blood, sweat, and tears to make the monthly nut of payroll, rent, etc., and have something left to take home that made it all worthwhile. Too often the mainstream media and gu’ment treat running a business, large, medium, or small, as an enviable perch from which to watch the envious sums of money roll in. Hah – we know that’s not the case because our trials and tribulations of long hours hard at work and reasonable risk-taking for a modest enterprise don’t always amount to a surefire plan to make a decent living.
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JFC you can’t even keep things straight between a discussion about a legally-mandated wage floor and a discussion about prevailing market wages being too high for whiny-ass proprietors who think a payroll at below-market wages is their God-given right.
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Most small business people are too tired to whine.
Part of the problem is governments who think they can control markets as you imply with regulation. What they (governments - at least the politicians who lead them) do is spur inflation and kill jobs.
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I am in the UK, so our experience may be different from that in America. But, in a working life during which I was always a trade union activisit, I have yet to see any employer welcome a rise in statutory minimum wages. Even when our minimum wage was at a generally agreed piss-poor level. Not any employer. Ever.
What they will do is trot out the same old story that a decent wage wil hit jobs. Often at the same time as arguing that income taxes for the employers tax bracket need to be reduced so they have “incentive”. In essence a argument that the well-off need more money to work hard - while the not well off need to have their income constrained so they work harder. Buy into that argument and you immediately start to live in a third world country which has little but contempt for society’s more vulnerable.
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Welcome to America late 2019.
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The conservative project over the last 60 years: create a legion of incredibly dumb pompous white guys who have read 5 Ron Paul newsletters and Atlas Shrugged, who then go about their days spouting a priori nonsense about economics untroubled by even the tiniest bit of empirical rigor.
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These days there is lack of respect for anyone whose views on topics diverges slightly with ones own political opinions. Both the left and right are guilty and people in the middle get squeezed between the two warring factions. You dismiss Libertarian ideology which essential places emphasis on individual autonomy and personal freedom. I am not sure how that helps move the current discussion forward. If embracing far-left political solutions is the answer, San Francisco should be nirvana. Maybe what the city needs is more emphasis on individual autonomy and personal freedom and less emphasis on being a nanny-state? Am I dumb and pompous? You don’t even know anything about me, my life or political views but are willing to make blanket statements that “anyone slightly to the right of me is stupid”
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I dismiss arguments that are exercises in pure air-castle construction that literally do not, one single time, bring facts into the discussion, and furthermore, that on their own terms don’t even make any coherent sense as air castles. There is no reason to respect one schmuck’s abstract bloviating about wages and their macroeconomic effects when he doesn’t even understand the difference between a minimum wage and a tight labor market.
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I fully accept that the definitions of what is right/left are different in America to the definitions here in the UK. But, i would never suggest that someone to the right of me is stupid, only that they are wrong. Of course, the further right you go, you do get to the point where they are not only wrong, but stupid as well. And then you get to the far right, who are not necessarily stupid but so, so wrong. And dangerous.
