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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Seattle restaurant industry warns of fallout as $15 minimum wage nears
By Jean Lee
Published March 24, 2015
Seattle restaurants are warning that the looming hike in the city’s minimum
wage to $15 an hour could soon force them to cut back their staffs and
raise prices.
For an industry with a slim profit margin to start with, the wage hike could
have a profound effect, even as supporters say it will benefit the economy
in the long run.
The increase, up from $9.32 an hour, is set to be phased in starting April 1
. The initial minimum wage will be $11 an hour. Employers with 500 or fewer
workers must increase their pay to $15 an hour by January 2019. Larger
employers, having 501 or more workers, have just two years to raise their
worker compensation to $15.
Many owners are concerned over what the changes will mean for business.
“It will be difficult to staff the front of the house as well as we have
before,” Brendan McGill, the chef and owner of the Hitchcock Restaurant
Group, told FoxNews.com.
Although McGill supports the minimum wage increase, he noted that, “less
people will be fighting over each other to fill up your water.”
The Seattle Restaurant Alliance worked with a mayoral task force from the
beginning in an attempt to find a compromise benefiting both restaurants and
workers, Anthony Anton, CEO of the Washington Restaurant Association, told
FoxNews.com. However, his association did not support the final outcome and
is now warning about the impact.
The looming wage hike ensures the model for how local restaurants operate is
going to change. It used to be that 36 percent of profits go to labor, with
30 percent for food and 30 percent for any other expenses. This leaves
about a 4 percent profit margin for most restaurants. With such a big wage
hike, restaurant owners are looking for new ways to keep that profit. This
means looking at raising prices, having fewer employees, using automated
ordering systems, changing tipping models, and more, Anton said.
“It won’t be one thing. This is too big a change to have a silver bullet,
” Anton said.
In a survey conducted in 2014 by the Washington Restaurant Association, the
top four responses of what restaurants predict they would have to do were:
raise prices, lay off employees, reduce employee hours or close their
business entirely.
Anton predicts the Seattle restaurant industry may experiment heavily with
the newer automated ordering systems as well, but it is still too early to
tell what will ultimately work.
The 15Now movement, however, is in full support of raising the minimum wage
to $15 an hour. Ty Moore, the 15Now national organizer, told FoxNews.com
that “15Now had a central role in initiating and organizing the grassroots
pressure campaign in Seattle.”
The movement really took off in Seattle after the 2013 campaign and election
of Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council as a “socialist alternative”
candidate. 15Now’s prediction, according to Moore, is that any job losses
that do happen will be more than compensated for by job gains because they
are putting more wages in workers’ pockets. These sorts of changes were
seen in San Francisco where they led the way in city-wide wage increases,
according to Moore.
When asked if 15Now thinks the new increase could negatively affect small
businesses, Moore pointed to the provision where smaller businesses have two
extra years to increase their wage to $15 for each employee.
In September, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray proposed a new division of the Seattle
Office of Civil Rights -- called the Office of Labor Standards – to focus
on educating the community about new requirements including the minimum wage
rules, paid sick leave and other worker policies. A senior policy analyst
told FoxNews.com that the Seattle Office for Civil Rights has been receiving
hundreds of calls from employers in the Seattle area who are eager to
comply and learn more about the wage increase ordinance. | T*********I
发帖数: 10729 | 2 "我就裁人"是无可奈何之举。双输就双输。总不能让老板亏钱挣吆喝吧。 |
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