Hahahaha! Whomp

Reminds me of "Joe" the "Plumber's" grand plans to start a business, except Obama socialism made it impossible.

The other hotels in the area are going to be paying $15 an hour. What kind of workers is he going to get at 2/3's the rate?

There's now a correction, assuming that it's in response to Goldy pointing out that it's a bullshit claim, that Shin, the owner of the motel was planning on increasing staff to over 30 in 2014 meaning the measure would apply. (What's known in debate circles as the Nuh-Unh, will too, you poop head rhetorical flourish.)

So let me see if I get this. The owner of the Inn says he'll be devastated by a measure that won't apply to him. BUT it would apply if he increased his staff by anywhere from 33% to 66% after 2014.

Assuming that his current business is going to grow to require as much as a 66% increase is staff, there won't be any additional revenue to cover a wage increase.

I get it...you were going to raise the workforce on the same amount of income, not generate any additional income as a result of the labor increase and you weren't going to wait to see if income increased before adding labor. I think I see the real reason the Quality Inn may be headed for bankruptcy. Some people shouldn't be in business for themselves as they haven't the slightest grasp of economics.

Raise your room rate by $3. No one will notice or care.

@3 @5 That's a different argument, and the Seattle Times editors are free to make it. But instead they lied to their readers, leaving the impression that business owners like Shin would be forced to pay the higher minimum wage.

That said, there are still plenty of people looking for work.

@9

And after lying, the correction is clearly lying.

The ethical thing here was to print a retraction. The ethical thing after lying to cover a different lie is to resign.

But give Ms. Chan the benefit of the doubt and say she really believed the whopper that the Inn owner told her. Then say she REALLY believed the bigger whopper about his planning to triple his staff.

If she really believed all that, Ms. Chan should resign for not having the journalistic instincts the lord gave a box jujubees.

#9

Well, if your job is to prove that the Seattle Times is written by idiots, I think that's already been well established by historic precedent.

However, you really should answer the challenge presented about this de jure increase driving up the de facto wage in the non-Seattle market of Washington State.

Also, will this higher wage create more competition, as workers from other parts of the state or country flock to Seattle to achieve the wage.

(Or is that part of the plan to keep Seattle crowded, and force density.)

When the Seattle Times' journalists get caught in a lie or, let's give them the doubt, "inadequate research", say, they spin the lie even deeper or attack the messenger with more lies.

It is a disease with that group and it is highly contagious. The infection just grows.

Higher wages attract the highest quality hires.

I forgot, that quality if labor equation can only be used to justify CEO pay.

Goldy, I'm on your side on this, but there are some finer points interpreting the numbers posted on industrial insurance accounts. Unlike some journalists I hope you prefer a correction. Those numbers are FTEs not the total number of employees. If you have 38 employees who work 20 hours per week you will have 19 FTEs. I don't know how employees are counted under the minimum wage law. Of course if this threshold will be a business killer as claimed you could rework the schedule to make less employees working more hours.

@14, But Pian Chan's update acknowledges that he doesn't have 30 employees now. And going by standard staffing numbers for a hotel of that sort of that size, they would be predicted to have about 15 employees.

The point, of course, is that Chan originally presented Shin as a victim of Prop.1 without ever checking to see whether or not his business was exempt. And then only after 3 days of the Yes campaign demanding a correction did she update her post.

It was sloppy and misleading. I would have been abused in my office, and rightly so, for making such a lazy mistake.

So the rooms are only 33%-66% as clean as they could be?

So what else has Pian Chan written for the Seattle Times, and are those pieces just as terrible? I guess what I'm saying is that if you're looking for a project, it might be kind of fun once all the election stuff is done with.

If you're bored or something...

@3: No, he'll just hire the folks who weren't qualified to get the limited number of $15/hour jobs, because that number is pretty much fixed by the number of qualifying hotels.

@17, yes, they are.

I don't know the hotel/motel business.
Does anyone here know anything about the subject? The actual economics of motels? Couldn't be that complicated though I am sure as with any business there are subtleties and lots to learn

But my first impression, as a traveller, is that a 104 room motel is not a tiny mom-and-pop operation. It's a real genuine business with real cash flow. Do the arithmetic.

And for that matter, just go do some googling and see what you find for sale (not room rate but what the a 100 unit motel is worth as a business) in the SeaTac (or similar) motel area. It can be worth a lot of money.

(Which raises the question why the cutoff at 30 employees? But that is a separate issue.)

Chan wrote that her father is now in Arizona and owns an apartment building that rents to a lot of Latinos. I wonder how responsible a landlord he is.

Hey Chan Joe-the-Plumbered the hotel owner (I don't make X right now, but it's just around the corner and therefore it's fact that I'm hurt by legislation Y).

In other news this 15 bucks minimum wage stuff is going to make my previously handsomely paid babysitters unionize.

@23

Hmm. Do you employ more than 30 babysitters in Seatac? Or rather, are you planning to?

Doesn't everybody?