I'm a California restaurant operator preparing for the $20-an-hour fast-food wage by trimming hours, eliminating employee vacation, and raising menu prices

That's because investors only make money when the value goes up. The pressure to always make more money than before is baked into the public ownership system we created. I think we should make all companies employee owned instead of investor owned and then you'd fix the broken incentive structure.

You bring up a great point. Once I applied for a mortgage and showed that I had a part time job and a small business. I had made some changes in my financial structure so it looked like on paper that year my company was failing even tho personally I made more money consistently over the years. Didn't matter, my loan got rejected cuz technically the business was making less money.

In fact the opposite is often true, such as when Huggies Diapers recently cut production costs and raised prices several years in a row.

The older I get the more I think that capitalism is incompatible with a moral society. I dont know what could replace it, but chasing "profit" has caused so much harm to our society.

And cut out the avocado toast.

Restaurants run on thin margins.

Not anywhere near as thin as you think. The official numbers are AFTER artificially deflating their profits for tax avoidance reasons.

he gives up every penny of that to make payroll.

Ridiculously unrealistic.

An employee pocketing $20 probably costs his employer $40

What have you been smoking?? In the real world, workers produce a hell of a lot more value than they're given in return. That's how companies profit.

he's trying to tighten up, keep those people on the payroll.

No, he's trying to recoup the profits lost from paying his workers a living wage by making it less livable for them. He's protecting his profits, not workers.

And gets demonized for it.

And rightly so. He's acting like the put upon victim when in reality he's complaining about having to pull other exploitation levers now that one is fixed at a lower setting.

Your numbers are wildly off. The raise amounts to 4$, your going from 20$ and jumping to 40$ is irrelevant because the employees are already employees, the only cost increase here is the 4$ extra per hour.

So you're looking at closer to 200k manhours based off your calculations or around 100 employees.

He runs 4 restaurants, and with that million dollars in profit he could cover the raises of 100 employees, and I highly highly doubt he's running anywhere near 25 employees per restaurant.

You have just calculated that he can hire 12 more people from the current profits (with made up numbers). That's not what's in question here. He's already got the people and needs to pay them marginally more.

In civilized nations 120 hours would be far below the legal minimum for a full time position. Here in the Netherlands the legal minimum is 4 weeks (20 days or 160 hours) but pretty much every company offers at least 25.

In a previous job I had 57 paid days off.

Australia has 20 days annual leave for full time employees mandated by law, and it carries over year on year so you can build up a significant chunk of time if you work somewhere for a long time. Also those hours belong to you, not the company, so you get it paid out if you quit.

We also have a Long Service Leave program where if you work somewhere for 7 year you get roughly a week off for every year of employment with a company, it does vary slightly state by state.
The construction industry has made an arrangment that as long as you are working construction in some way, your long service leave entitlement carry over between employers and jobs.

Lot of companies also add carers leave on top of this, which may not carry over year on year, and sick leave can be fairly variable between everywhere I've ever worked has been pretty casual about it, if you call in sick a day here or there then they don't hassle you, but for longer periods you might need a doctor's certificate.

It's pretty good.

More resources for better places. It's not like laid off people just suddenly die.

America is a dystopia unlike any other, where we smile and fuck each other over and then say "hey this is just the way it is!"

I hate it here.

You should change your username to intensely_stupid@jackass.me

Oh no!

Probably shouldn’t have gotten rid of slavery as now the slaves don’t have a job anymore either.

Won’t somebody think of upholding the problem?!

Why don’t you run a restaurant, yourself

This is all making sense now, you've been emotionally triggered by this post and the opinions here because you've likely had personal experience with owning and/or operating an eatery.

How long did you last? A year?

I agree, but it takes a strong stomach in local government to not step in and prop up "market rates" for the benefit of banks and landowners.

The risk in running a restaurant is exactly this. Sometimes good businesses just can’t support themselves. Their employees need to earn enough to live and the owners need to earn enough to keep the business afloat. You can’t have the latter without the former so if your costs are too high, you have to close. No one deserves to run a business and the food world is full of the absolute best ideas and people that totally bomb.

This line always bothers me. When I worked broiler I realized that a NY strip steak retailed at 23 bucks. I made 14/hr and would make dozens of steaks an hour on average with most happening Friday night. The NY strip at cost was just under 7 bucks. It took me less then one hour on that busy shift to pay my entire weekly salary with the revenue I generated in steaks alone, but almost 2 hours of work to afford one for myself. Steamed vegetables, soda, pasta, anything with minimal prep had even better margins.

That particular store went under but not before the owner literally bought three yachts. THREE. That experience alone would radicalize any reasonable person

The unfortunate thing here is that small businesses fail often, there should be improved regulations to prevent predatory capitalism so small one offs can thrive. But I lose my sympathy for a franchisee or corporation that can't skim as much cream so the soulless bastards make life worse for the workers instead of taking a slightly smaller top cut.

yeah fuck baby steps. and fuck the governor because other governors are doing better, right?

right?