Minimum wage for dummies
by digby
So I hear the right wing is having a full blown hissy fit over the alleged destruction of the Seattle restaurant scene because of their hike in the minimum wage. Apparently some magazine noted that some restaurants were closing (a truly unusual event…) and surmised that it must be because the 15.00 minimum wage hike (which doesn’t fully take effect for years) had passed.
Unfortunately, somebody forget to tell the restaurant owners who were closing some of their restaurants that this was the reason:
The magazine suggested that the minimum wage law might be a contributing factor in the closures of the Boat Street Cafe, Little Uncle, Grub, and Shanik.
“That’s weird,” Boat Street Cafe owner Renee Erickson told the Seattle Times when fact-checkers emailed to confirm the Seattle Magazine story. “No, that’s not why I’m closing Boat Street.” Erickson’s three other restaurants remain open, and two brand new ones are in the works in Seattle. “Opening more businesses would not be smart if I felt it was going to hinder my success,” said Erickson, who described herself as “totally on board with the $15 min.”
Poncharee Koungpunchart and Wiley Frank of Little Uncle “were never interviewed for these articles,” they told the paper. They are closing one of their two locations, “but pre-emptively closing a restaurant seven years before the full effect of the law takes place seems preposterous to us.” Frank reportedly asked one conservative writer who had picked up the wage-menace red herring to “not make assumptions about our business to promote your political values.”
The owner of Shanik told the Times that closing has “nothing to do with wages,” and Grub’s owner explained that they’re being bought out and rebranded by new ownership because the breakfast and sandwich bistro has been “a huge success.”
The Seattle Magazine article itself notes that new restaurants are opening at a healthy clip around the city, and that the Capitol Hill neighborhood is in the middle of “an unprecedented dining boom.”
Why ask the restaurant owners why they are closing when you can simply assume they are morons who are closing their restaurant over a bill that has yet to take effect?
Seattle’s restaurant scene is in no danger of imploding. If it does it will be because too many people finally get sick of eating bacon infused foams not because of the minimum wage.
The sad thing is that it doesn’t even matter that the business community and the city hashed all this out together:
Seattle’s business community was heavily involved in crafting graduated wage hike schedules that provide deferential treatment to employers who are already offering workers some non-cash compensation. The law’s complexity and flexibility owes in large part to the business community’s fierce negotiating in months of meetings with labor officials and local politicians. All sides left “a little bit of blood on the floor and some deeply held principles,” the business community’s lead negotiator told ThinkProgress last summer.
Why let a little hard won negotiation with all sides involved stand in the way of a good storyline about workers destroying businesses with their greed and avarice?
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