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Mar 14, 2014 at 5:47 pm
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
It saw a leaf with many aphids on it, and decided to have them for breakfast.
But just then a grouchy lady bug flew in from the right.
It too saw the aphids and wanted them for breakfast.
"Good Morning," said the friendly ladybug.
"Go away! shouted the grouchy ladybug. "I want those aphids."
"We can share them," suggested the friendly ladybug.
"No. They're mine, all mine," screamed the grouchy ladybug. "Or do you want to fight for them?"
"If you insist."
Now you're going to make me listen to some Sleater-Kinney.
@1 shame that's not how wealth is created.
The answer, of course, is to get rid of tipping, or at least of tipping as a significant determinant of income level.
How about making more pizza parlors baking more pizzas? The solution to our problems is not the redistribution of the pizzas we’ve got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.
It's called capitalism for a reason, you need capital to play the game. When jobs don't even pay enough to live, much less to build up a little wealth for yourself, the system is not working.
If you really want to see more wealth in this country then you have to have a system where everyone has the opportunity to build some.
Learn how to make your own pizza.
Don't they just need to establish parameters w/o bullshit loopholes? Like meals or a cut rate bus pass don't count as compensation, but healthcare and retirement benefits do? Could benefits be mandated at a 2-1 ratio against wage? So to legally pay and employee $13 an hour an employer would need to pay $4 into a retirement fund to make up the $2 less than $15?
I dunno - real benefits are pretty nice - not as much fun as having extra cash but pretty fucking awesome when your kid breaks her arm or you realize that your involuntary retirement savings are going to come in handy down the road.
@12 Make your own pizza? Yeah that should be the slogan of all the workers at dominoes and Pizza Hut.
@7 my wealth does not create your poverty... But a worker's modest minimum wage somehow does? If you actually followed your own rhetoric to its logical conclusion you might realize better pay for the working poor equals more customers for biz owners: win-win!
Because the total compensation is unstable. Insurance rates fluctuate, that is, go up, so your total compensation increases and you get the same salary or your total compensation stays the same and your take-home pay actually drops.
And why wouldn't meals or bus passes count? It's all compensation that costs the employer. If you're looking at it in terms of total compensation, should a restaurant owner be penalized for employees having meals while a bookstore owner would never be required to provide food?
it's extremely complex to fairly value benefits packages. it will work like this: the employer wil tell you how much your benefits are worth, and if you don't like it, you won't be able to challenge it because you the little minimum wage worker can't afford to pay a lawyer $20,000 to hire experts at $500 per hour to evaluate the fair market value of that health care package and other benefits. second point. if the employer IS fairly valuing the benefits -- say by setting it at their COST -- then they SAVE NOTHING by including benefits. QED the only reason they want this humongous loophole is to cheat us. Third point. we have obamacare, so buy your own health care plan the one YOU choose, not the one chosen for you by a paternalistic employer. they're not your daddy. you're not their serf. be a bit more independent. at $15 it's clean and simple and enforceable. at "wages plus value of benefits" it's just not enforceable. look it costs $500 to get a crappy house valuation, and back a few years ago all the appraisers were lying a bout that and telling the person buying what they wanted to hear. the folks appraising benefits plans for employers will similarly lie and be biased. why would you trust an employer to do the right thing in this regard? when it's in their interest to not do so? you'll never know if you're being cheated in short. so you will be. big time.
And even if you vest, and keep track of it until you retire, what guarantee is there that the company will still be there.
If you think I am making something up, these are common in construction companies that bid on publicly funded projects with prevailing wage requirements.
A basic question for anybody who knows - is the $15 wage for any work performed in Seattle, or for businesses located in Seattle? I'm assuming it's the former otherwise every mobile business in the city will relocate to Shoreline ..
How the hell could that make any sense? So, if I order a pizza from a pizza shop located on Shoreline, does the pizza delivery person man $15/hour for the time their car is in Seattle? How the hell does that work anyway?
And NO ONE is talking about what businesses could EASILY DO to get around this: fire everyone and re-hire them as independent contractors, paying them whatever the job and experience calls for. No workman's comp, no paid sick leave, no Social Security, no benefits. How's that for "progress"?
If raising the minimum wage was an effective anti-poverty tool, then why doesn't Bangladesh simply institute a $50/hour minimum wage?
Also, a particular benefit may not be helpful. If your spouse has family healthcare, you don't benefit much from part of your minimum wage being diverted to buy duplicate coverage. Shift meals are nice, but if your check is going to be docked for full value, many workers would prefer to pack a lunch. Especially at an expensive place.
The point is that at minimum wage, even at $15 dollars is still just getting by, in Seattle. Essentially forcing a worker to take some of that in preselected benefits will undermine the goal, to move low wage workers to a reasonable amount of self sufficiency.
Nothing will turn me against this initiative faster than that shit.
Fuck that.
Why is that the case? If having a high minimum wage is an effective anti-poverty tool, then why don't all third world countries just have a high minimum wage? Go ahead, attack the question, but you can't answer it because the only true answer is that MW is not an anti-poverty tool.
Yeah, you go right ahead and vote for whichever sides and candidates never use robocalls. Let me know how that works out.
While political calls are generally exempt from the Do-Not-Call list, *all* robocalls to cellphones are specifically prohibited unless you have given prior permission, and violators are subject to large fines.
I didn't stay on the line long enough to listen to see if there was a way to contact the campaign to let them know that what they are doing is completely illegal, and to have them contact whoever gave them that number to demand that they remove it from their calling database.
@23, a modest minimum wage law in low wage third world countries would indeed help people immensely. as would expanded workplace and environmental safety regulations, workers' rights laws, and especially increased workers' representation in their job market through strong unions. we don't propose $50/hr because we don't seek heavy handed government intervention to make people wealthy, merely enforcement of bare minimum of standards for how human workers should treated.
also @22, you may think it's ridiculous but it's no longer a point up for debate, it's the law. I've read it - or at least the city's summary document. feel free to read it yourself. the details are spelled out quite clearly as to what is expected of companies who wish to do business in seattle. and if your shoreline pizza place doesn't like it, I wouldn't want to order their pizza anyway if that's how they treat their workers.
You say stupid shit that makes it obvious you know nothing. Then once it has been explained, you repeat it the next day.
I contracted independently as a temp for two years, I know how it works. I had a set schedule and had to show up at work every day, just like an employee. Please do some research sometime before making idiotic statements.
Bullshit. The Federal minimum wage peaked at $8.56/hour in 1968. Source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/201…
And worker productivity is only higher because of technology. One worker with a computer in 2014 can do the work of two workers without one in 1965.
First, I don't see how any minimum wage law can be enforced across city limits. I mean, if I have a tech support guy on the phone in India, he is technically working in Seattle. Does he get 15/hour for answering my phone call?
As for raising the MW in third world countries, many of them actually do have MW laws but they don't do shit. Czech Republic, for example, has a higher minimum wage than Greece. Granted, neither are "third world countries" but why is it Greece still has higher poverty than the Czech Republic despite having a higher MW? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the countries collapse after being run by socialists for years who spent money that wasn't there...