WaPo Wonkblogger Chico Harlan introduces us to Right-to-Work minimum wage America.
Shanna Tippen was another hourly worker at the bottom of the nation’s economy, looking forward to a 25 cent bump in the Arkansas minimum wage that would make it easier for her to buy diapers for her grandson.When I wrote about her in the Post last month, she said the minimum wage hike would bring her a bit of financial relief, but it wouldn’t lift her above the poverty line.
She called me the other day to say she didn’t get to enjoy the 25-cent hike for long. After the story came out, she says she was fired from her job for talking to the Post.
I spend a lot of time writing about people at the low end of the economy, and I see up close how narrowly they get by day-to-day. In this case, writing about Tippen’s plight may have made her situation worse.
Tippen says she was fired by her boss, hotel manager Herry Patel. Earlier that day, Patel had called the Post to express frustration that he had been quoted giving his opinion about the minimum wage hike. (He objected to it.)
It was soon after, Tippen says, that Patel found her in the lobby and fired her.
“He said I was stupid and dumb for talking to [the Post],” Tippen said. “He cussed me and asked me why you wrote the article. I said, ‘Because he’s a reporter; that’s what he does.’ He said, ‘it was wrong for me to talk to you.'”
So unless there’s an Arkansas law that forbids people from getting fired for talking to a Washington Post reporter, Ms. Tippen is basically screwed. It used to be that collective bargaining and unions would give a worker a fighting chance against situations like this.
Those days were effectively over before I left elementary school and St. Ronnie rid the Shining City on the Hill of air traffic controllers.
Oh well, her fault for being poor, right? If she was a worthy human being, she would have worked her way up to hotel franchise owner.
justawriter
Let’s not forget Right to Work’s ravishing handmaiden, At Will Employment.
Villago Delenda Est
Herry Patel needs some attitude readjustment.
Hal
I have a friend who repeatedly rants on Facebook about how minimum wage workers don’t deserve 15 dollars an hour. He is personally offended at the suggestion and judging by the likes and comments he gets, plenty of people agree. Pitting working class people against one another is a perfect way to keep wages low and the higher up’s bonuses nice and big.
I wish people would remember that the next time they rant about unions, public employees with pensions or raising the min wage.
sparrow
The last time I tried to have a civil discussion with my parents about politics, they informed me that unions were useful in the past, but we don’t need them anymore. Now they’re just so powerful and terrible! They ruin everything! And don’t get them started on teacher’s unions, the worst of all!
I had to chug my entire beer and then change the subject because I really just couldn’t handle any more of that.
Violet
Wonder how the TripAdvisor or Yelp pages of the Days Inn in Pine Bluff, Arkansas are looking?
boatboy_srq
That’s Right To Work in a nutshell. It enables employers to hire and fire at will, for any and every reason, and it enables employees to face this on a daily basis without recourse. Talking to reporters, wearing orange, just about anything is fair game for employers to use. Employees, of course, are free to walk in, say “I quit” and walk back out again without penalty (theoretically), but just try it and expect to be employable afterward. This is the Conservatist Galtian entrepreneur’s paradise the Reichwing wants to create.
Germy Shoemangler
@Violet: I got addicted to yelp last year when I started researching various restaurants in my area. My addiction spread to tripadvisor, and then (unhealthily) I started reading about restaurants not in my neighborhood.
You’d be surprised how many restaurants got bad reviews from people who said they were treated like crap by waitresses and/or other clerks because someone in their party was transgender/gay/minority. It’s really disgusting, and I’m glad victims are fighting back.
Paul in KY
Isn’t that (being fired like she was) some form of illegal retaliation?
Cacti
The decline of the unionized workforce tracks directly with the flatlining of middle class income in constant dollars.
The greatest victory of the ownership class has been in convincing the working class that unions are to blame for their decreased standard of living.
Paul in KY
@sparrow: God bless you for keeping your head there.
JustRuss
Herry Patel also spoke to the reporter, so it’s strange that he fired Tippen for doing so. And nowhere in the WaPo article does she badmouth her job or her boss.
The article also quotes a manager of a SavUMore market saying that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would force them to close their doors. Assuming they have a crew of 5 people on the clock for 16 hours a day, their labor costs would go up by 12 to 13 thousand dollars, plus a bit more for FICA. If their margins are really that tight they have a seriously bad business plan.
Davis X. Machina
Contingent. Cowed. Compliant.
Coming to your workplace, if it’s not already there.
Cacti
@Paul in KY:
Only illegal if she was fired for a reason explicitly forbidden by federal labor law (race, religion, etc.).
Otherwise, in a right to work state, your boss can fire you if they don’t like the color of your tie.
Paul in KY
@Cacti: Amazing what advertising & repeatedly saying something completely false can do.
Sorta like what Goering said about it not being too hard to point the ire of the masses at what you want it pointed out, facts be damned.
Keith P.
Phil Robertson will take up her cause in 3…2…
Botsplainer
And 4 out of 5 white minimum wage Arkansans will still vote GOP because colored bucks eating T-bone steaks.
And they might be rich some day, so repeal capital gains and estate taxes.
Time to spin up Greenwood’s “Proud to be ‘Murkan”…
Violet
@Paul in KY: At-will working conditions mean you can be fired for anything–anything–except a few reasons that are protected by law. Race and gender. Some states have GLBT protections. Boss doesn’t like your shirt color or zodiac sign? Fired. You talk to the wrong person or have the wrong type of car? Fired.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Germy Shoemangler: Having been on the other end of it, you’d be stunned how many people leave bad Yelp reviews, often accusing owners or staff of everything from discrimination to fraud, just because they weren’t treated like the special snowflakes they so religiously believe they are.
The people who leave bad reviews on Yelp are the same spoiled, entitled motherfuckers who leave one-cent tips and a scrawled note on the check saying “do better next time, Jesus loves you and that’s worth more than any money”.
Paul in KY
@Cacti: Capitalism!
Davis X. Machina
@Paul in KY: No.
AR Employment at will has few exceptions. Jury duty, military duty, safety, social media (can’t be fired for refusing to surrender passwords, user names, etc.) and the usual common law exceptions.
Paul in KY
@Davis X. Machina: Surprised at the social media exception. That sounds….dare I say it…liberal.
boatboy_srq
@Paul in KY: @Cacti: Ditto Cacti. This is the part of RTW that folks who haven’t directly experienced it don’t get. There’s no legal anything required. And even if the root cause is race/gender/handicap, there are plenty of other reasons that can be used so a termination will fall under RTW.
Davis X. Machina
@Paul in KY: Recent — 2013 — and as far as I can tell, untested. Anybody who puts in an effort should be able to circumvent, anyways.
Another Holocene Human
I’m in a union and it’s against the policy handbook to give “unapproved interviews”. They can’t nail us for talking about union actions, though.
They have threatened quite a few employees with firing when all they did was chat with a college kid who didn’t identify themselves, then the kid turned around and used it as fodder in a lifestyle article in the student paper.
The bottom line is that the public has no fucking idea what kind of shit is going on with their money because the employees can’t talk about it.
eta: RTW state
Botsplainer
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Yelp sucks ass. It’s the equivalent of going to your place of business to find graffiti of dicks painted on the front door while being prohibited from scrubbing them off – and you can’t even opt out.
Professor
If only these workers had joined a Union.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@JustRuss: Not really. Yeah, she didn’t badmouth him, but just sharing what she makes and how poor she is makes him look like the cheapskate evil motherfucker greedhead he is, and he knows it. Ergo the firing.
Back when I used to work a lot of retail to pay for my lifestyle of “aspirant musician”, virtually every place I worked for cited as a firing offense discussing with anyone how much you make. I think a lot of places still do. I think that may not be legal but they do it anyway, which ought to be the motto of 90% of American businesses.
Sherparick
The serfs are not really human and need to be kept in their place. See http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/10126-how-a-brutal-strain-of-american-aristocrats-have-come-to-rule-america
inkadu
@Villago Delenda Est:
I used to think violence was one of the downsides of unions but am now starting to see the appeal.
Paul in KY
Appreciate all the quick answers. Have to leave work & hike in woods.
boatboy_srq
@Violet: I’ve seen a termination for not putting in sufficient overtime hours. Coworker was hitting 55 hours per week: not enough.
Violet
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Some places are fighting back if they can. Some guy posted a negative review on Yelp about not being seated and the owner checked his surveillance footage and turns out the Yelp guy was lying about what he posted. Link.
elmo
@boatboy_srq:
My grandfather fought with the IRA, and fled to this country after the Easter Rising. I’d have fired the bloody Orangemen too!
(/St. Patrick’s Day hangover)
Waldo
If this story gets any bigger, Henry Patel will be the hotel’s next casualty. Not going to solve the larger problem, but hey, poetic justice is better than no justice at all.
inkadu
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I think there’s a law muddling its way through congress, as a response to the Supreme Court striking down the Ledbetter Act, that makes it illegal for companies to forbid employees from talking about their salaries. I don’t know if that would extend to customers, or if the bill would ever pass. After all, free speech extends to bringing your AK-47 to Walmart, but not telling people about your financial situation.
I wonder if replying to a customer request for your income with, “If I told you, I’d be fired,” would be acceptable to employers. Yet, when everything is forbidden, everything is allowed, so may as well say you get paid in blowjobs from the manager.
Roger Moore
@JustRuss:
My guess is that the article showed what a heartless asshole he is, and he took out his frustration on an easy target, confirming the portrayal.
Their problem is not understanding that their competition will also have to raise wages. You hear the same thing every time people talk about raising the minimum wage. Business owners look at their own books, assume they can’t possibly raise prices, and predict doom if they’re forced to raise wages. Instead, everyone has to raise wages, everyone can get away with small price increases, and the whole things turns out to be a giant nothingburger.
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: I don’t think people believe that. Actually, they believe unions are doing fine (they’re not) and that they don’t need any help. They also believe unions don’t lift a finger to help them (not true).
What they DO think is that someone, somewhere is getting paid for sitting around at a hiring hall or some lousy worker has seniority over a “good” worker, so unions suck!
Funny, everybody gets old one day. Try not getting old and see how that works out. Seniority, like payroll taxes, is not just some bullshit, but it’s funny the people who think it’s some sort of scam.
(Note: they think it’s a scam because a black dude has seniority over them on the job board. Ahem.)
boatboy_srq
@elmo: This was ENTIRELY unrelated. Law firm’s staff wore orange so they could find each other at the bar on Friday for happy hour. Management saw news about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, heard “mumble mumble Ukraine mumble PROTEST mumble RESISTANCE mumble” and sacked the lot of them for being “affiliated with undesirable organization”.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Botsplainer: There’s that, and the (to me the most offensive) practice of hugely inflating a businesses rating when they decide to pay the extortion fees that Yelp demands.
We have a local airline right across the border, Volaris. Volaris had five-star ratings on Yelp in spite of being widely known throughout the region as not only a dishonest but actually dangerous airline, and they had a five-star rating until they stopped paying sometime last year, whereupon all the magically hidden comments (including mine) appeared and they dropped to a one and a half rating.
You shouldn’t get smeared if you don’t pay, and you shouldn’t be allowed to advertise to people you’re the greatest under the sun just because you paid some thugs. Yelp, like any other group of evil sonsofbitches, does both.
elmo
@inkadu:
I’m not sure that’s the case, but there is a recent NLRB decision to the same effect: that it’s an unfair labor practice (and therefore unlawful) to discipline employees for talking about their compensation, because it’s a form of protected concerted activity.
Note that this applies whether the workplace is organized or not.
Her problem in this case is that she wasn’t talking with another employee, but with an outsider. So it isn’t “concerted.” Now, if TWO of Patel’s employees had done so, I think she’d have a good case before the NLRB (and again, that’s true whether or not there’s a union in the workplace).
Botsplainer
@boatboy_srq:
“Insufficient dedication to necessary tasks”.
elmo
@boatboy_srq: I know; I went to your link and read the story. My attempt at being amusing –>>FAIL.
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Been seeing the “bad waiter” stories on RawStory over the last year or so and while one of them was a hoax by an attention seeker (actually, in that case it was a “bad customer”), in most of them when we got the ‘rest of the story’ it turned out it was true, there was plenty of evidence, and in one case an owner non-pologized for being racist to Black patrons and just couldn’t see what the problem was.
People get discriminated against in public accommodations every fucking day, which is why the CRA is still VERY relevant. Fuck you, Rand Paul, and fuck you Mike Pence also. (GLBT is not covered by CRA … but should be. Some states have laws.)
boatboy_srq
@Botsplainer: Ayuh. In this case “unable to meet project deadlines” – where the project deadlines mandated 60+ hour weeks to accomplish.
Elizabelle
The earlier article about Ms. Tippen was interesting, and Henry Patel does come off as a douche.
There’s your free money.
Ms. Tippen was very candid about having a criminal record (spent almost a year in jail for attempted embezzlement) and that she’d looked into more highly paid work ($10) 45 minutes away. I hope Days Inn parent company, Wyndham Worldwide, finds Ms. Tippen a new job ASAP. She’s paid her debt to society, and sounds like she was a good employee. Why else would Snidely Whiplash Patel serve her up for an interview?
And yeah, the SavUMore guy sounds like a crab in a barrel type. Probably aspires to be a Walton. Although, couldn’t his customers buy more from him, with more disposable income?
The Burger King franchise owner was bright enough to realize he needed to raise the pay of his employees already making $7.50, to keep them.
And this was curious, from a higher wage proponent:
“I know there are economic arguments against raising the minimum wage, but I think just purely in a state where folks are poorer and working hard, we know it’s not enough for them to live on,” said Steve Copley, who chaired the coalition, called Give Arkansas A Raise Now. “It doesn’t surprise me that ordinary folks would say, ‘Yeah, it’s the right thing to do.’”
Are they good economic arguments? Suspect they’re specious, but made by (better paid) very serious people.
boatboy_srq
@elmo: Protestant Irish here, and grew up in Catholic Irish town. So I’m sympathetic, but not especially amused.
Another Holocene Human
It’s not that Yelp! doesn’t have its share of special snowflake posters … and it’s not that GLBT people aren’t immune from special snowflakitis. I never correct servers who misgender me because I got my head bit off when I was 17 by this very butch woman who was EXTREMELY offended that I called her “sir”. (Everyone I knew socially who looked like that wanted to be called “sir”.) And since I was a minimum wage counter flunkie I had to take it.
But it’s wrong to just wave away the underlying issue here with bias and profiling/treatment of customers. Look at the recent shopping while Black kerfuffle in New York where a high end store was systemically harassing Black patrons based on zero evidence. Just sad. Yelp is one thing, but this sort of shit is legitimately going on all the time.
elmo
@boatboy_srq:
Yep, understandable. Always helps to know one’s audience.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
As far as I can tell, they’re typical freshwater economics arguments. They’re extremely elegant, convincing models based on beautiful, simple premises, but they have the small disadvantage of not agreeing with experiment. That last caveat will never stop people from trotting them out, though.
Another Holocene Human
@Elizabelle: They are specious, as in based on no evidence, but the argument is “out there”.
kc
Read the WaPo story; the boss, Patel, sounds like a raging asshole.
For some reason, the writer buries this at the bottom of the story: Patel is the one who suggested that the reporter talk to Tippen; he introduced them.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: That sounds like most of freshwater economics, actually.
That whole ‘not conforming to the real world’ is a minor problem to be addressed later. Maybe by a grad student.
boatboy_srq
@Elizabelle: There is an argument that goes like this: changes to the minimum wage are significant in that there are wages above the minimum but tied to it (in some multiple of the minimum), so that a $1/hr increase for minimum wage means perhaps a $3-5/hr bump (or more) for the higher salaries and the increase acts as a multiplier for business expenses. Not persuasive, but at least it does explain resistance in some other form than merely keeping Teh Poors in their place.
Elizabelle
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Patel actually served Tippen up for the interview. From the first link:
If Patel or Wyndham wants to blow smoke, they’ll say Ms. Tippen didn’t disclose her previous legal troubles (attempted theft from an earlier employer), unless she did.
I hope Ms. Tippen finds a better employer and better salary. She’s supporting two young adult children and one grandson in diapers (with a granddaughter due to be born soon). She’s 43.
boatboy_srq
@elmo: We’re good. Just remember that I’ll be drinking the Young’s ESB while you’re downing your Guinness. We can argue about which is the better beer (later). ,-)
Steve in the ATL
@elmo: Not necessarily. The recent (March 15) memo from the general counsel of the NLRB addresses unlawful rules regarding third party communications, and notes that employees have the right to discuss employment concerns and labor relations.
Citizen Alan
@sparrow:
I honestly think the biggest reason conservativism keeps kicking liberalism’s ass is that liberals are too polite to argue back when their conservative relatives say stupid shit.
kc
@JustRuss:
This paragraph was near the end of the article:
emphasis mine
Violet
@kc: Yeah, no kidding. From the original article:
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
The argument I’ve usually seen is that there are some jobs that have a true free market wage below the legal minimum wage, and raising the minimum wage will destroy those jobs because employers will be forced to overpay for them. It’s a plausible sounding argument, but I’m deeply suspicious that pay, especially at the very bottom of the scale, is being set by anything like a free market. The disparity in market power between big employers and their employees is just too big for the market to work well.
Violet
@Citizen Alan:
Maybe that’s because you know your wingnut relatives anger easily and have firearms.
Violet
@Elizabelle: Wyndham Worldwide’s response is not encouraging:
They don’t care.
Elizabelle
We should call it “Right to Waste.”
Waste people’s lives, not pay them adequately for their time …. I give you, your American South.
And this is while we still have people employees.
What do we do when teh robots are even more developed and affordable? Yikes.
MazeDancer
This may lead to double posting, so sorry, because FYWP has me in moderation for too many links.
Searching “Henry Patel, Arkansas” brings up this post here at BJ. But not much else.
Was hoping that searching Ms.Tippen would bring up some legal defense fund or “contribute to her” something. Did not find any.
Here is Customer Service at Days Inn corporate, where comments may be posted: http://www.contacthelp.com/Day…..er-service
Days Inn is owned by the Wyndham Hotel Group. Here is their contact page:
http://www.wyndhamworldwide.com/contact-us
JDM
@Roger Moore:
After all, he couldn’t fire himself.
Elizabelle
@Violet: That is corporatese, but I saw a pretty good smack at Henry Patel, who we are told is the manager (is he an owner?) included:
\
It’s all on Henry!
Kristin
In California, the law is kind of grey, but the Labor Commissioner has jurisdiction over claims that employees were fired for “lawful off duty conduct” and can order reinstatement, backpay, etc. The Courts have said that means conduct protected by Article I of the California Constitution. That includes free speech. Not sure if they could maintain a cause of action in court, but maybe if it’s free-speech based.
Also, in CA, employers can’t fire an employee for disclosing the amount of his/her wages. (Not to say that employers won’t come up with another “basis” for termination.)
Another Holocene Human
@kc: We think of gas station attendants and motel operators as being pretty working class, and in a sense they are, but these South Asian families that have been buying them to put family members in business actually come from the upper middle class in a country where domestic workers are paid starvation wages and debt slavery is a way of life. In Indian culture it’s considered an upper class obligation to employ domestic workers like drivers and so on so that they have a job. With only Mexico-levels of inequality in the US it can seem like US domestic workers are getting over. They’re not, and rent is MUCH higher for the poor in the US than in India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh.
Some of these families that come over here are great. Some of them are upper class twits. (There’s a guy where I live who is constantly in the paper moaning about how his gas station is going out of business, for like the last ten years. I think he’s bitter he didn’t get into real estate like the real richie riches in this area. There are also these brothers whose family bought them a chain of KFC’s and proceeded to run every single one of them into the ground and out of business. I’m sure they blamed the stupid customers.)
Violet
@MazeDancer: If you put in “Henry Patel, Pine Bluff, Arkansas” more stuff comes up. Seems he owns a Subway franchise as well. Not sure if he also owns a Super 8 or this motel location has changed names.
Ruckus
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Yelp tried to shake me down when I owned my retail store. Never quite stated that paying them got me better reviews but they did everything they could to convince me that paying them would make my business the best in the area. Told them to take a hike. I also think that if you pay them enough they actually write positive reviews, which of course are completely faked.
aimai
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Some are, some obviously aren’t. A wise business owner comes on and says something soothing to the cranks and the legitimately riled up equally. You are crazy if you think that people aren’t planning trips, meals, and etc… using Yelp and Tripadvisor reviews.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Look at the salary of anyone making that argument. That’s the tell right there.
Also even if true that some jobs didn’t make as much as the employee is being paid, why the hell would someone not just remove the position and save the money? The job is necessary and is part of the cost of doing business. What many, many owners/CEOs want is that costs approach zero so profits approach 100%. They have a complete failure to understand that everything has a cost and that trying to cut that cost below whatever necessary gets you a shit product. Example, Walmart.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Seems there will always be a segment of the Ahmurrcan population that resents paying
forlabormore than once.Ruckus
@aimai:
You are right, people do use Yelp for the reviews. Unless they know that a place with lots of great reviews is most likely paying for them. Sure people may like the place and the food may be the best around but I still think the old axiom that people often complain but rarely commend is valid.
sharl
Related to this issue is today’s Fresh Air show (NPR), which features Kevin Kruse (twitter) talking about his book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. To summarize it, U.S. Big Bidness essentially weaponized religion as a means to fight The New Deal and all that commie-type stuff that came with it. A bit from that second link:
The episode will be available online later (tonight or tomorrow), via the show’s website.
These people – GOP Governors (and other politicians, a lot of em Wall $treet Dems), ALEC, US Chamber of Commerce, etc. – are like Sauron’s Nazgûl, but we ain’t got Teh Ring that can be chucked into a hot magma pool to zap them. Gonna be a loooong haul dealing with this lot…
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
I notice that you corrected your own comment.
I’ve found that many people who do physical work for a living understand labor better than those who sit in an upholstered chair and make decisions about others. They still complain when they feel someone is making more than what they think the job is worth, that worth is of course usually less than what they make.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
The reason is that the company doesn’t work without those positions. The underlying problem is that companies are complex entities, and there are a huge number of parts involved in producing anything of value. It’s very difficult to determine exactly how much each employee contributes to the overall product of the company, so we more or less make it up. Naturally, the people who are making it up are the capitalists and managers, so they place a high value on capital and management and a low value on everything else. They’ll only accept the value of anything else when they’re absolutely forced to. When there’s nobody like a union forcing them to, they’ll ignore the real value being added by all those employees and try to pay them as little as possible.
Eric U.
@sharl: the Spanish Inquisition was underway when the founders were writing the U.S. constitution. They meant the part about freedom of religion.
Elizabelle
Another way Ms. Tippen can make the national news: this is the lede of the earlier story from February:
Candles and one toddler, soon to be another baby in the house. What could go wrong?
We never discussed it (that I saw) but I am still grieving for the family of seven children who died in a Brooklyn house fire about 10 days ago. Ages 5-16. The family is Orthodox Jewish; they’d left a warming plate out for the Sabbath (no turning on ovens). No working smoke detectors on the first or second floor; 1920s wood construction house. Fire started in basement and went up the staircase, trapping the children. Family of Gabriel and Gayle Sassoon. Only silver lining (and can you call it that?) is that the local Orthodox families lined up for smoke detectors and take fire safety much more seriously.
But a terrible price to pay. It was a horrible story because of the human toll, but also because, for want of working smoke detectors, depleted batteries perhaps — such a small thing, really — a family and home were lost. The Sassoons appear to be prosperous.
Ms. Tippen’s situation is more dire.
Elizabelle
@sharl: Thanks for the head’s up. Will tune in; think Fresh Air is on at 3 in DC area ….
Great topic.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: I was actually trying to make the point that there’s a set of the populace that resents having their property taken away and allowed to earn its own living, which means that said property now has to be paid a salary and allowed things like breaks and sleep and votes and such. If you read that as a “correction”,… well, um,…
Belafon
OT: So Governor Pence, and someone I argued with on twitter over the weekend, both played the “your not tolerating my intolerence is you being a hypocrit.” I’m trying to think of the right words, other than “fuck you,” to point out that I will never tolerate their intolerance. Anyone thought of a good way to counter their line?
sharl
@Eric U.: That’s an interesting observation, and one I’d never realized (or had forgotten).
While the Constitution promises freedom of religion and speech, that applies to freedom from government control. But it clearly does not – and practically, I suppose it cannot – protect institutions of religion and free speech (the media) from capture by non-governmental forces.
It’s too bad that corporate interests run the table so often in the creation of law; makes it increasingly difficult to see a difference between corporate and government interests.
sharl
@Elizabelle: WAMU moved it to 2pm a few months ago. The interview with that guy lasted until around 2:40 or so, I think.
Citizen_X
@boatboy_srq:
Unfortunately, you have to expect that sort of thing at Putin, Medvedev & Associates.
Violet
@Belafon: They are free to say what they want and even codify it into law, even if it is intolerant. They are also free to deal with the consequences. In the case of Mike Pence, Indiana is losing business. In the case of your Twitter acquaintance, you don’t have to listen to them.
They want it both ways–spew their intolerance, codify it into law, and pay no consequences. That’s not how it works.
Elizabelle
@sharl: Ah, thanks. Will catch the podcast.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@aimai: I know they do – and they’re stupid for doing so.
I haven’t used Yelp in several years and stopped using Trip Advisor last year. So far the quality of my restaurant and business experiences has gone nothing but up. I find asking people I trust goes so much further towards insuring positive experiences.
Travel…can’t tell much of a change. All I can say about that is don’t fly Volaris, people!
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
There’s a reason people say that safety regulations are always written in blood.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
This might be “reasonable” in terms of primitive economic theory, which would look at wages simply as a cost. But it is insane in the real world.
A sub-minimum wage job, or any job below a livable wage, is workable if you have, for example, a kid working part time for extra money. It becomes less workable very quickly if a person relies on this as his or her primary income. A worker would only accept this wage if others in the family are earning income. Otherwise, you soon reduce everyone to starvation level wages (see Irish Famine, for example) and you end up with people having to leave the area (or the entire country) in order to move someplace where wages are higher.
We are seeing this all across America as jobs disappear, and the only jobs left for many don’t pay enough for anyone.
Punchy
THAT DAMN NUMBER AGAIN….
From TPM:
Imagine that.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
You made my point for me. And it isn’t that hard to see the value of a position. Either it is necessary to the function of the business or it isn’t. The person filling that position may be doing a great or a lousy job but the position needs to be filled or management has little to no understanding of what it takes to produce their product, be it hard goods or service. And if they have no idea what it takes to do that, they have no idea what the positions value is. And now we are back to management being full of shit. I’ve owned two different types of businesses and worked in management at a third type. Learned long, long ago (before owning the first business) that without knowing the real value of a position there is no way you can deliver a reasonable product, either from a cost or quality or time standpoint.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
This is more or less the argument I use. Any business that depends on paying its employees too little to live on shouldn’t be allowed to remain open. If it’s providing genuine social value, it should be able to raise prices enough to pay its employees a living wage.
mai naem mobile
@MazeDancer: its Herry Patel. Its usually Harry Patel. Hari is a common indian name and a lot of Hari’s change it to Harry to Americanize it. Patel is like Smith in Indian last names and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more than a thousand Hari/Harry/Herry Patels in the US and more than one in Pine Bluff.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
OK correction may not have been the best description but we actually agree, people don’t value the work of others very well.
lou
@Another Holocene Human: My mother had been a flight attendant. She’s a right-wing Republican and I was pointing out to her that the pendulum had swung too far on the side of corporations. She actually agreed with that. However, when I mentioned unions as a check and balance, her complaint was: She had money pulled out of her paycheck for the FA union, but as far as she could tell, they did absolutely nothing to fight for better hours or higher wages for flight attendants.
I guess my riposte should have been that unions have become so powerless, that they couldn’t keep up the good fight?
kc
@Violet:
Great minds. :D
Gavin
It’s not about income inequality because it’s never about income inequality.
It’s not about race because it’s never about race.
It’s not about equality of opportunity because it’s never about equality of opportunity.
Surely people who make lots of money are the mostest virtuous!
Violet
@mai naem mobile:
It’s actually a Gujarati name. Gujaratis make up a large percentage of the Indian diaspora in the UK, US and other countries.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: Indeed. Especially the ones that resent any payment after the initial
purchasepay period.Ohio Mom
@Elizabelle: One of the folktales I grew up with as a secular Jew was about the Orthodox family who had so many candles lit at once — for the Sabbath and for anniversaries of loved ones’ deaths — that their house burnt down. But as I remember this apocryphal tale, nobody died in it.
The moral of the story was clearly, it’s good to be modern.
Ms. Tippen on the other hand, does not appear to desire to live in the past, even if her finances sometime dictate a more old-fashioned approach to finding her way in the predawn hours. So yes, her situation is way more dire.
mai naem mobile
I have a good friend who manages a hotel. She hates Trip Advisor. She’s tired of people expecting a discount for #1 stupid stuff and #2 Stuff that is the customers fault but blamed on the hotel and the customer using Trip Advisor as a weapon to get a discount. For example she had 2 customers who made a reservation several months ago whose cards got declined. She got hold of one person and took care of it. Didn’t get hold of other guest and gave away the reservation at 2AM. Person arrived at 230AM. Only had larger room avail. Charged customer more than original rate but less.than regular rate of larger room. Customer complained on Trip Advisor. Shes under no obligation to keep reservation with declined card. Btw, people have no clue at how high the annual franchisee fees are and the franchisee rules are ridiculous. Imagine having an HOA decide how your house is decorated and maintained.on the inside.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Not sure I follow this one, unless you are talking about taxes?
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
I don’t quite take this tack. A business cannot be forced to provide social value. And in the real world, a business that raises prices to pay wages may go out of business.
I knew a guy who had a fast food chicken franchise with 5 employees. He had to let two go and started working more hours himself. He could only raise prices so much. Then after a certain point, fewer people would come to eat. Ultimately he went out of business. I have hard core “progressive” friends who say if he couldn’t afford to stay in business, tough cookies. The employees deserved higher wages. Of course, this was cold comfort to the actual employees who no longer had their jobs and no prospects for other employment in the area.
There is no easy answers here.
boatboy_srq
@Ruckus: They miss their slaves. Employees are an ongoing expense right on the balance sheets. ANY salary is excessive.
burnspbesq
@Steve in the ATL:
Know anyone in Arkansas who does ULP claims pro bono? Unfortunately, I don’t (and I’m not volunteering, because what I know about labor law would fit on one side of a business card, and I want her to have competent representations)..
Ohio Mom
@Eric U.: Have to chime in and add a thank you for this observation that the Spanish Inquisition was contemporary with the founding of the US. I’d never put the two together. Makes me wonder what other combinations of historical events I’ve overlooked.
I did realize, back in junior high, that while Laura Ingalls Wilder (how I loved that series as a child and how revolted I am by it now) was growing up on the prairie, Monet and the other Impressionists were busy changing the course of art history. I used to wonder what it would have been like to transport the Ingalls to a Paris studio but I could never even begin to imagine them making any sense of one of those haystack paintings.
Doug r
@Violet: NLRB somewhat disagrees .
Linnaeus
@lou:
Anti-union people sometimes do this thing wherein they speak out of both sides of their mouths:
1. Unions are unnecessary, bad for the economy, reduce freedom, are a third-party imposition between the employee and employer, etc. etc.
2. Unions don’t do enough to raise wages, benefits, secure better employee rights, working conditions, etc.
But when a union does do item #2? See item #1.
another Holocene human
@sparrow: Young ppl in this country are being screwed and are looking for a new deal. Fox watching olds better hope they’re not vindictive, too.
Rent. Student loans. And heaps of condescension.
Linnaeus
@Brachiator:
In a way, I can understand this because our society, much more frequently, tells folks that if they’re not earning enough, if they’ve lost their job through no fault of their own, tough cookies.
ETA: Which is not to say that’s really an answer. I just understand where it comes from.
another Holocene human
@Brachiator: the easy answer is to set wage floor by law and government enforce
Some marginal businesses will go under but the economy over all will be healthier.
Europeans eat out less but live longer, less money stress.
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
OK. Not being a slave owner or too much of an asshole I always paid wages above market value. I figured that market value always sets wages at the minimum. I wanted people to be happy as reasonably possible to be at work, they seem to do a better job. Which in the long run made a better product and a less stressful owner.
@Brachiator:
You are correct that there are no easy answers. And restaurants are some of the hardest businesses to run, you depend on everything being done at the right time, presented in the right way and all of this depends on the customer’s concepts of the value of any meal, which can change any time before, during or after the meal. You have spoilage, disease/cleanliness, suppliers problems, etc. Many of these are out of the control of the owner/management. Plus it can cost an arm and leg to start a restaurant, with little to no concept of ever being successful. And yet a well run place can be there for generations (I know of a couple).
Belafon
@Brachiator: Which is why the idea that “companies can raise salaries if they want” is wrong. It doesn’t work, and the companies that don’t raise their salaries gain benefits by not doing anything (there are some things I cannot buy at Aldi that I have to get at Wal-Mart, and an employee of Aldi who has to get the same thing would be giving money to Wal-Mart).
Brachiator
@boatboy_srq:
It’s not just about “Teh Poors.” Unions have been prominent in helping people, including non-union workers, get higher wages. But union influence, especially in the private sector, has been in decline for decades as the economy has changed. Study after study talks about wage stagnation, which is killing the middle class as much as it is harming poor people. And it’s been happening for 35 years. Here’s the hard facts:
http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
“Stagnant wages for middle-wage workers, declining wages for low-wage workers
Over the entire 34-year period between 1979 and 2013, the hourly wages of middle-wage workers (median-wage workers who earned more than half the workforce but less than the other half) were stagnant, rising just 6 percent—less than 0.2 percent per year. This wage growth, in fact, occurred only because wages grew in the late 1990s when labor markets got tight enough—unemployment, for instance, fell to 4 percent in 1999 and 2000—to finally deliver across-the-board hourly wage growth. The wages of middle-wage workers were totally flat or in decline over the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, except for the late 1990s. The wages of low-wage workers fared even worse, falling 5 percent from 1979 to 2013. In contrast, the hourly wages of high-wage workers rose 41 percent.”
The difference is not simply people at the top earning more and keeping it away from everyone else. And so far, I don’t see any solutions for this coming from anyone.
MomSense
@Eric U.:
By that point I think the Inquisitors were turning their attention to Deists and Freemasons. Hmmm.
Germy Shoemangler
ABINGTON, Pa. — Saying the military needs to do more to compete with corporate America for quality recruits, Defense Secretary Ash Carter opened the door Monday to relaxing some enlistment standards — particularly for high-tech or cyber security jobs.
Speaking to students at his former suburban Philadelphia high school, Carter said the military could ease age requirements and bring in older people who are mid-career, or provide student loan repayments to attract students who have finished college.
There are few details so far, but Carter said the military needs to be more flexible in order to recruit and retain quality people.
The idea, largely in line with the civilian approach to recruitment, upends the military’s more rigid mindset, which puts a high value on certain standards. It reignites a persistent debate about how the services approve waivers for recruits who have committed lesser crimes, behaved badly, are older than current regulations allow or have other physical issues that prevent them from joining the military.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@kc:
IOW, he hand-picked an employee to talk to the reporter and then got pissed off when she said that, yes, an extra $2 a day (assuming an 8-hour workday) would make a big difference to her. What a jackhole.
sharl
OT, but those who remember Angry Black Lady (‘ABL’) from her days as a front pager here might be interested in knowing that the troll who has tormented her (and friends/allies, including Cole) for 3-4 years under so many different accounts – each one kept getting suspended for abuse; he’d just create a new one and start all over again – isn’t even bothering with new accounts any more. Now that he’s been doxxed by Wonkette’s Editrix,* and after initially denying that he was the troll, he isn’t even bothering with new, throw-away accounts, but is now trolling under his normal-guy (i.e., his non-insane persona) twitter account.
Dude obviously needs an intervention (no joke).
*There was much rejoicing in The Realm, and many offers to buy drinks for Schoenkopf. But she’s in her third trimester now, and as she says, ‘alcoholic beverages all taste like shit’ at this point (not at ALL the case for a non-pregnant Editrix), so such celebrations will have to wait.
replicnt6
Edited for accuracy. The decline in unions has not been a natural process. Other countries still have strong unions. The decline in unions has been a deliberate goal of Republicans. cf. Scott Walker, Right to Work, etc, etc.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
The point of minimum wages, though, is that they force the competitors to raise wages- and presumably prices- at the same time, so that doing so doesn’t drive people out of business. If your friend couldn’t stay in business paying the minimum wage, that doesn’t suggest that he’d do better if the minimum wage were lower, since all his competitors would lower their wages, and presumably their prices. It’s possible that your friend was driven out of business because the competition was cheating their workers- wage theft is rampant in the fast food business- but that’s an argument about enforcing labor laws, not about the minimum wage.
Chris T.
@Roger Moore:
You are correct.
It’s not clear precisely where the labor market gets “free enough” but I’d put it somewhere above $15/hr, perhaps as high as $30/hr or so.
scav
@Belafon: The “Your not tolerating my intolerence is you being a hypocrite” card is rather exactly matched by the “Your attempting to silence my moral characterization and judgement of your actions and opinions is you being a hypocrite” card. They do not own morality.
Elizabelle
@Ruckus: What does some restaurants and small stores in: rents rising once their area gentrifies or attracts more business.
And then enter the national chains, and exit the local flavor and what made that shopping district special.
In earlier story, Chico Harlan of WaPost interviewed a Burger King cook — who has apparently not lost his job for talking to the Post, and a regional BK franchiser:
It’s expensive to hire and fire, or used to be. Mr. Flis sees the benefit of retaining staff. Training takes time and effort. Patel and others run client-facing businesses. Do you want a stressed out, scared person to be the only person you deal with?
Hotels and restaurants have to have some minimum level of staffing and cleanliness.
Big box retailers are skating there. WalMart’s in trouble — thank goodness — and it’s very hard to find staff on the floor at KMart or Michaels (neither of which I shop at frequently, but noticed I had to go to the registers and ask them to page someone to help me recently.)
Trader Joe’s is wonderfully staffed, but it’s a niche and serves a more prosperous clientele.
I guess this shabby service and employment relationship is good enough for the plebes.
Roger Moore
@replicnt6:
Repeal Taft Hartley!
Mike J
@Roger Moore:
Or it’s possible he was in the wrong business, or he was at the wrong location, or he’s just not very good at business.
If a business can’t afford to pay its employees, it shouldn’t be in business.
sparrow
@Citizen Alan: Well, I’m not generally polite with them. That was the first conversation after years of having politics banned at my parents home because I would argue with them and not let things go. I also tend to get rather emotional (not good for making good arguments and convincing people honestly). I wish I knew what magic arguments to use because they are well-encased in Fox News bullshit.
Ruckus
@Chris T.:
Of course many of those against an actual free labor market are the ones fighting against any minimum wage. They not only don’t see the value of paying a living wage, they don’t want people to be able to pick and choose where they work and what they do for work. As @boatboy_srq: says, they want their slaves or at the very least, a low cost, compliant workforce.
Elizabelle
@sparrow:
I think Balloon Juice should have a weekly thread about how to bat down the core beliefs of the Fox News free lunch crowd. Pick a topic or two, and really discuss how to do this.
Pithy and unarguable, even witty little comebacks that are TRUE, to counter the crap they confidently spew at us.
Cruising the WaPost reader comments on the Shanna Tippen stories (I know, I know), one brilliant commenter rang in with something like “minimum wage is just the starting wage. It’s not meant to be a liveable wage.”
Like all the middle aged people staring back from behind fast food counters and hotel bell stands are there because they didn’t get enough acne on the first go round.
Elizabelle
Because that advocate was assuming there were good reasons behind the “oh noes! There must be economic reasons not to raise minimum wage!”
And there probably are not. Not good ones. It’s just “conventional wisdom” because it gets stated so forcefully and frequently.
We need to have comebacks, and do the same and give others courage to push back — wittily and tactfully and memorably — but push back against the conventional wisdom of Morning Joe and the manufacturing consensus types.
Brachiator
@another Holocene human:
We have been in a long, stagnant wage decline. I don’t see the economy overall becoming healthier. This seems as wrongheaded as those who insist that austerity works.
Greece is about as stressed out as you could be. There are some countries where the youth unemployment approaches 60 percent. People are not just eating out less, they are eating less.
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
Yes. All of this.
Retail in of itself is difficult enough. Add in all the hazards of owning a restaurant and…..
Along with everything else, a lot of people eat out because of convenience. They may choose a place on price but they know they pay more than a bag lunch or cooking dinner and that’s OK. When money is tight restaurants are one of the first hit. It is for most, discretionary spending.
MomSense
@Elizabelle:
Part of the challenge is that the talking points the FOX watchers use are so quick and simplistic, albeit false. It takes 20 minutes just to explain why one talking point is false and that is if the person is even willing to dialogue. Sometimes debunking one false talking point leads you down a rabbit hole of multiple false talking points that are used to “prove” the original false talking point.
It’s exhausting dealing with this BS. I can completely sympathize with wanting to just drink a beer in peace.
Ruckus
@MomSense:
I’ve used the “find me the actual facts that leads you to that” argument but they always come back they heard it on the news. The next step is to let them know that faux news is bullshit, but they trust it, they believe it and everything else is just liberal bullshit trying to discredit the truth. I don’t see any way around this, except when Rupert dies of old age. And maybe not even then, someone may stick a fence post up his ass and stand him in the corner as a reminder that the truth can be murdered and bullshit sold in it’s place.
schrodinger's cat
@Brachiator: This has happened because of the policy prescriptions adopted since the 1980. Policies that favor capital over labor. To pretend that income inequality is a natural outcome of forces beyond our control, is bogus and wrong. We are not talking of forces of gravitational attraction for crying out loud.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Competitors were laying off as well. And it wasn’t just the minimum wage, but also California laws regarding overtime and who are full time employees. Many of these rules are very reasonable and necessary, but they still have an impact.
I have notice over the past few years that restaurants are getting kicked in the teeth, no matter whether lower end coffee shops or higher end businesses. You can just walk by and see how empty they are. People generally spend about 33 percent of their income for food. They will shift more of this to home cooking as opposed to eating out depending on a number of factors, but eating out is price inelastic. Unless people are rich, they will not spend more on eating out. So eateries cannot simply raise prices to meet higher wages. They have to attract more business, become more efficient (more automation, less fresh food preparation on premises, etc) or lay people off.
But in this slow stagnating economy, people are losing jobs, and remaining employees are not getting raises, and must spend more for housing, food, and fuel.
Also, especially in Southern California (where I have seen it first hand), everyone knows the dirty secret is that the food business exists by employing illegal aliens (the same is true of the construction industry in some jobs). Walking in Westwood once (home of UCLA) I noticed a sign outside a restaurant advertising for workers. The sign was in Spanish. If you were an English speaking citizen, you would not even know of the work offer, and a citizen who might apply would never be hired. Some jobs, from lower level cooks, to bus boys, almost are never offered to anyone other than undocumented people.
I absolutely believe in a higher minimum wage. But I am not blind to the problems it will cause and to those it will not resolve. We have a larger, more fundamental problem with the economy. Not enough jobs, an not enough well paying jobs, and less wage growth in existing jobs.
boatboy_srq
@Ohio Mom:
Spanish Inquisition: ongoing.
Inquisition in general: ongoing.
French Protestant tolerance: ended in 1685 (less than 100 years before) and not reinstated until after Constitution final version was approved and sent to the states for ratification. Huguenot refugees were fairly recent arrivals in England and Prussia, and more than a few had fled from there to the Colonies before the Revolution.
Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 (130 years before the Revolution): these were the among the biggest Catholic/Protestant conflicts and ended with each nation having the authority to determine its own faith (i.e. state establishment of religion) – which meant that being an X in a Y nation made you unwelcome and/or subject to conversion, taxation, whatever.
English Civil War: ended in 1651. Puritan/Anglican conflict, with strong Papist overtones. Charles 1 deposed 1649, Charles 2 crowned 1651. Puritans had fared badly under James 1 / Charles 1; under Charles 2 they were tolerated (about as well as Catholics).
Tolerance for minority sects: minimal at best. Puritans settled Massachusetts, Quakers settled Pennsylvania, Catholics settled Maryland, all to escape persecution in Europe.
All this as the last throes of the great spiritual earthquake that began with Catharism and exploded on the European stage in 1517. Nearly two hundred years of war over the number and nature of the sacraments, the selling of Indulgences, Papal Infallibility, etc. etc.. Not only was oppression ongoing, but had been happening to so many for so long that nobody alive remembered meeting anyone who hadn’t been living through the conflict.
mai naem mobile
Part of the problem is Americans themselves. They shop shop shop to save a penny. Also the franchising and corporatization of EVERYthing. Jeezus. My friend who runs the hotel could make a ton more money providing the same level of service with employees getting paid better but you need the franchise to get the bookings which the franchisor gets a chunk of. The franchisor doesn’t provide much for the fees they get except the name. My parents used to run a big ticket item.business that I worked at during college. I would work with a client, do all the legwork and put in several hours , they would shop around and then come back and tell me they found somebody willing to do it for $20 less. This is a $3 to 5 K item and they want me to go down $20 to match a price. There were times I wouldn’t match and tell them to go to the $20 less person. In my recent experiences buying big ticket items I get people who.have no clue about what they’re selling and it pisses me off. The business can’t even be bothered to train these people and I get the feeling the people are minimum wage people paid possibly with small sales.incentives.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: Exactly. There’s only so many meals and consumer goods the top of the economic pyramid can buy. We’re safer if the pie is shared more broadly. It is the rising tide that benefits all boats.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
With a baseball bat…
Grumpy Code Monkey
@boatboy_srq:
Right to Work means you don’t have to join a union to work somewhere. At Will means you can leave your job or be terminated for (almost) any reason, or even no reason IIUC.
Remember, At Will cuts both ways; an employee can leave a job for pretty much any reason. For a semi-skilled worker like myself, who has little trouble finding a new job (as long as the market for aging code monkeys is good, anyway), it’s a boon; it gives me a smidge of leverage when it comes to negotiating a salary, for example.
For low-paid service workers like Tippen, not so much.
AFAIK, pretty much every state is an At Will state. Not as many are Right to Work.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator: Not disagreeing or anything, but how does this relate to an argument that raising the minimum wage will have catastrophic effects for businesses employing professionals earning [MinimumWage]x[X]? Because I agree with you – I just don’t get how you got where you did from what I said that you excerpted to get there.
john b
@Grumpy Code Monkey: Are there states where an employee CAN’T leave a business for whatever reason they want? I’m failing to see how At Will adds any freedoms to the worker.
Chris
@MomSense:
Absolutely all of this QFT. This is exactly why I gave up arguing with conservatives (really, even talking politics with conservatives – in some cases, talking to them, period, if they can’t not talk about it) a long time ago. Not a day goes by without some brand-new imaginary “fact” from the sealed media bubble they live in being brought up – “oh yeah, they disproved global warming. You didn’t know?”
You can’t even say “link or it didn’t happen,” because they WILL link it – it’ll just be to some rag financed by the Kochs and Murdochs of the world to pull bullshit out of its ass, which it’ll take you a couple of hours of research to thoroughly debunk.
And once you’re done with that they’ll simply switch the conversation to how it’s not fair that you’re allowed to use YOUR liberally biased sources as more valid than THEIR conservatively biased sources. I read a full on blog post from one of my cousins a few years ago making what he clearly thought was a brilliant argument that if Christians weren’t allowed to use the Bible to defend the value of the Bible, then atheists shouldn’t be allowed to use reason and logic to defend the value of reason and logic.
There’s just absolutely no point talking to these goshdarn people. The madness and polarization are as extreme now as they were in the run-up to the Civil War, and our learning the art of the pithy comeback isn’t going to change that. If it was that simple, conservatism would’ve fallen before Aaron Sorkin back in the late nineties.
Roger Moore
@Elizabelle:
Somebody needs to tell the employers that, because they seem to have forgotten the part where they give people raises after they’re no longer starting.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Labor market is not a “free market”. To argue that Walmart and a minimum wage worker have the same power is ridiculous.
boatboy_srq
@Grumpy Code Monkey: I stand corrected. I lump the two together in my head because the places likely to terminate for no cause tend to be RtW as well as AW: AW with protections doesn’t yield the kind of turnover AW+RtW does. But for your own position, where you are (as a code monkey) matters to how well semi-skilled sells. There are places where if you can find a job in that field, the conditions are so bad and the expectations so high that working fast food might actually be preferable. I have horror stories (from a comparable field) just a few years back; and the worst part of those is that the folks who were still working in that field (for peanuts) were horrified that I was leaving and heading northward. I heard a lot of “they TAX up there” from folks who clearly hadn’t explored their options, because the “taxes” were <10% income and the salaries were 2x+. Those volk are so convinced that Big Gummint will take all their money that they won't even bother looking and discovering just how bad a deal they have where they are.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@john b: From the employee’s perspective, all states are the same AFAIK. From the employer’s perspective, I think Montana is the big exception (they require a probationary period prior to termination).
Also, at will is assumed to be the default, unless there’s language in the employment documents stating otherwise. IANAL, but I’m assuming if you signed your name to a contract where you pledged to work no less than 9 months on something, you could not quit before that time was up, no matter how much the job turns to shit in the meantime.
And like I said, it’s only beneficial to employees who would be in high demand; it doesn’t do dick for anyone at the bottom end of the pay scale.
Elizabelle
@MomSense:
I hear you, and this is why I think we should work on 1 or 2 minute elevator speeches about what is really happening. Not a lot of facts and figures, or anything to make them think “Al Gore!”, but some fallback responses we can use in day to day life, to try to turn the tide.
Fox does this, profitably and on purpose. It’s why Chris (above) despairs of finding any common ground with rightwing-spouting weaseltalkers.
I wish we could formulate some brief responses, that we could all put into our own words, that would work. Because there’s so much bullshit out there, and it’s strangling attempts at really solving problems (which is why it was spewed in the first place — maintain the status quo — resistance is futile).
Yes, their stuff is quick and simple and truthy, but it’s killing us, and we need to learn to rebut.
Wittily and intelligently and briefly would be good. Give courage to others who listen and are just as appalled as we are.
gene108
@Elizabelle:
If we could do that we should become highly paid political consultants and PR types.
It ain’t easy.
Brachiator
@schrodinger’s cat:
We haven’t seen only the Republicans or the Democrats in power since 1980, or uniform policy prescriptions.
Here’s the weird thing. Even though it is still fairly diverse, the economy of Southern California has been declining since around 1965. You can see the steady decline as aerospace, defense and automotive industries shrank from post war heights (and the decline of the space program). The Miracle Mile along Wilshire Blvd used to be home to regional headquarters of banks and insurance industries. Now many of the buildings (with the small exception of Beverly Hills) are empty or telecommunications hubs or home to much smaller firms. Automation and computerization shrank middle management. Fewer department stores and supermarkets, all of which provided steady employment to people graduating from high school and college.
The manufacturing base has moved largely to China. Construction requires fewer people than ever before. I’ve seen pre-fab mini malls erected by fewer than 8 workers operating heavy equipment.
And of course, union membership has declined as many of these industries declined. You see variations of this all over the country.
Not entirely forces beyond our control, but also just not the result of bad policies.
Roger Moore
@boatboy_srq:
I find that a good way of thinking about it is that the English Civil War was a more recent memory for the Founding Fathers than the American Civil War is today. Hell the Second Jacobite Rebellion was as recent for them as Vietnam is for us.
boatboy_srq
@john b: At Will allows an employee to walk – same day, no penalty (at least in theory). But it also allows an employer to terminate the same way. Termination for cause is immediate anywhere; At Will allows immediate termination for no cause whatever. That it allows an employee the same opportunity loses its meaning when unemployment is anything above 0% because in most cases the employee’s work product is a small percentage of the business’ productivity, whereas the employee’s salary is >=50% of said employee’s household income.
@Ruckus: You sound like a great employer. There are folks out there who do NOT feel the way you do about labor, who want their slaves back and resent paying those Lazy Goodfernuthin’ Layabouts any salary. When you hear Paul or McConnell or any other from that region and persuasion talking about “eliminating the minimum wage” – that’s the dogwhistle version: they can’t get slavery back legally, so they’ll squeeze every joule of productivity from Those People they now have to hire and pay regularly for as close to nothing as possible. And they’ll resent every cent of those paychecks because they shouldn’t have to have paid an ongoing wage to Those People in the first place.
Elizabelle
@gene108: I realize it’s not easy.
But we have a lot of snarky and whipsmart people here, and a forum for commenting, and why not try?
boatboy_srq
@Roger Moore: It’s all of a piece, really. The Thirty Years War was big, and the impact was still being felt. We talk about the English influences, but the French, Dutch, German and other experiences were just as formative for the colonies where those nationalities migrated. There were plenty of Huguenots who went to New England in the 18th century, for example, who had learned the painful lesson that Tolerance offered by one monarch could be easiily rescinded by the next.
john b
@boatboy_srq: what would be the “penalty” in non-“At Will” states? As far as I know, all notice for jobs is customary and good for getting references, but I don’t see how anyone could be forced into keeping a job. Seems an awful lot like slavery or indentured servitude or something.
Is there any place in this country where someone is not able to quit their job same day without penalty?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@boatboy_srq: There’s a reason I stayed in Austin. There’s plenty of work, some of which is right in my wheelhouse, and many of the employers are sane. After 25 years I know what red flags to look for.
Pay’s not the greatest, and I know I could make a helluva lot more money somewhere else, but I like the climate.
fuckwit
Kill kill kill kill kill the poor… kill kill kill kill kill the poor toniiiight! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8zhNb8ANe8
Chris
@Elizabelle:
Well hell, despite what I said above, I’m good with us trying that, if any FP’er would like to host it. Dubious – but why not?
Roger Moore
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
I don’t think this is correct. IAANAL, but my understanding is that courts will rarely require specific performance, i.e. requiring you to keep working under a contract, and instead tend to impose financial penalties. So you could be forced to cough up any bonuses you got for signing the contract, lose severance and accrued vacation, etc., but you would probably not be forced to continue working. Most smart employers wouldn’t ask for that in the first place, since an employee who’s forced to work by court order is unlikely to give them quality results.
Germy Shoemangler
@Elizabelle: I agree. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been struck dumb by some ignorant remark, phony statistic, outright lie or unfair slander (Al Gore said he invented the internet! Oil and gas companies actually pay 60% tax rate! etc.)
I’d love a handy little talking-point guide.
Other subjects I’d like to see:
Worst job/boss or best job/boss
Worst neighbor/best neighbor
Things RWNJ’s say
Contractor horrorstories
Landlord experiences (good or bad)
Mike
Where is the fundraiser for her? At $7.50 per hour, even a lukewarm internet fundraiser could give her a year or even two to better herself and re-enter the workforce at higher wages. $40k would get her through tech school and into a skilled profession.
We did better for a bus driver that had mean kids (and she deserved every penny). I’d think this one would be a no brainer.
boatboy_srq
@john b: The “benefit” is sold to the workforce as an advantage; IIRC there is some UI advantage to the system, and there’s less of a mark on work history. The actual measurable benefits accrue to the employers, who no longer have to deal with “difficult” staff and can dismiss them without incurring penalties for UI/taxes/benefits. A conventional layoff, for example, puts an employer on the hook for UI or transitional expenses: AtWill does not; likewise termination without cause is grounds for an employee to sue for his/her job back; At Will voids that consideration since there is no need for grounds for dismissal. So not only can an employer terminate an employee immediately with no warning for the wrong perfume/cologne, the wrong color apparel, insufficient (excess) hours worked, or simply not liking their green eyes, but they can do so without having to pay for unemployment, benefits, etc etc and they’re immune from wrongful termination actions brought by former employees.
I know an outfit in BC’s back yard that has had a class action suit for former employees ongoing for nearly 10 years, which is unlikely to get much traction because of At Will laws: the place treats its staff like dirt and gets away with it legally. It’s not “indentured servitude” in that an employee can always walk away – but (as mentioned earlier) this stomps all over the Randian idea that an employee can take his/her skills to the marketplace and find a reasonable exchange because successfully leaving a job assumes a) enough of a financial cushion to survive the period between leaving the job and finding another that will accept “I left because I was treated like dirt” as a sound reason to leave and b) there’s another vacancy for some comparable work in the immediate marketplace (and too often there isn’t).
At Will is also scary because the non-Ruckuses of the world will hold that over employees’ heads (“I can fire your a## anytime – now get back to work!”). You’re assuming that the bad old world Dickens wrote about is gone: it isn’t, and there is a measurable portion of the populace that thinks not only that it should come back in full force but that Dickens’ villains didn’t go far enough.
fuckwit
@Brachiator: A corporation should, however. A corporation is a legal fiction created by the state and enforced by the state (meaning: by the PEOPLE, which is who the state is, in a democracy), temporarily, to perform some social good. Ever since Southern Pacific vs Santa Clara in the late 1800s we’ve gotten completely fucked up about this. Corporations are not people, they don’t even have a right to exist! Corporate charters should have expiration dates. Instead of looking for “new markets” and mergers and acquisitions, once a corporation is done with its social purpose it should be dissolved. Term limits for corporations. Kill them… not the poor.
muddy
@Brachiator:
They could have a different rate depending on whether or not someone else takes you as a dependent.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@john b: It really depends on the language in the employment contract. If it says you’re being hired at-will, then you can quit any time you want without penalty, and you can be fired/laid off at any time without cause.
If the contract says you will work for a period of no less than X months, then if you leave before that period you’re liable for damanges or penalties. Whether those some constraints apply to your employer (they probably won’t) again depends on the language in the contract.
AFAIK. IANAL. HTH. HAND.
TANSTAAFL.
Brachiator
@boatboy_srq:
Raising the minimum wage may be useful, even necessary. The data show that wages for low wage workers have been declining, while remaining stagnant for other groups.
However, raising the minimum wage does not address the larger issue of ongoing wage stagnation, or the collapse of middle class and middle income jobs. Raising the minimum wage used to put pressure on other wage levels, which were often raised to adjust for inflation. Wage gains by unions would put pressure on similar non-union jobs. But the impact was not, and probably would not be catastrophic. And in the current environment, I think that wage stagnation would just continue, even at higher wage levels.
Steve in the ATL
@burnspbesq: Happy to say that I know only one person in Arkansas now. She is a HuffPo blogger, so she has a different type of wage issue….
Cluttered Mind
@Elizabelle: It can’t work. Just as one example of many, Bill O’Reilly has been known to pull statistics directly out of his ass and then cite a government agency as the source. He has done this even when he has a member of the agency in question on his show. I’m thinking specifically of the time he and Dr. Carl Hart had this exchange:
O’REILLY: And the prevalence of this is overwhelming now, so you’re going to have a lot of casualties on the battlefield.
HART: That’s not true. Let’s talk about the statistic, let’s talk about the data. In 1978, the recent number of marijuana smokers in the 12th grade, it was 37 percent of the 12th graders said that they smoked marijuana recently. Today that number is down to 22 percent.
O’REILLY: Not the number I just gave.
HART: Well, your number is wrong. Your number is wrong.
O’REILLY: Take it up with the National Institutes of Health. All right? They’re the one that–
HART: No, look, I am a council member on the National Institute of Health. Your number is wrong. I’m telling you, it’s 22 percent of seniors who smoke marijuana in the past month. That’s a fact.
O’REILLY: Well, I doubt it’s a fact, because we don’t get this wrong, these researchers.
HART: That’s wrong.
O’REILLY: All right, we’ll call them again and tomorrow I will say yes or no. Go ahead, Dr. Ablow.
You can’t combat lies with truth when the people being lied to are certain they are the only ones who know the truth. People in the GOP/Fox bubble are beyond hope of being rescued from the outside. They save themselves from it if they can (look at David Brock), but most can’t/won’t. Write them off and try to build a better future without them. These people can’t be reasoned with, only defeated.
WereBear
I’m afraid so. If they liked logic and reason and using their mind, they wouldn’t be watching Fox News.
Fox tells them what they want to believe.
Robert Paehlke
Name the chain. I believe it is Day’s Inn. I am trying to confirm. They fix this in 24 hours or I will never stay there again as long as I live.
J R in WV
My father’s family ran a successful business. When there was a union organizing drive, they felt srtongly that they should manage their business without input from an outside entity.
They did this by paying experienced staff higher than union scale after the family all worked throught the strike. I started at minimum wage, $0.80 IIRC, it was a very long time ago. I got a small bump every 3 months, until I hit Journeyman wages… I forget what that was, but as skilled craftsman, it was high enough to send your kids to college.
These guys, like Herry Patel, are in contrast brutal extractive bosses, unwilling to spring an extra penny to someone who works and goes the extra mile for them. I have no pity for them, and I am glad to know than when I travel, which we do quite a bit, never stay with the company behind Days Inn, Wyndham, or any of their other “brands”, which are eady to track, as I have a “savers card” for all their would-be hotels.
Lurking Canadian
@Brachiator: There seems to be a fundamental problem in the economy. I think the place where it’s most obvious is food. It’s an open secret that basically all of our food is grown, picked, slaughtered, packaged and processes by migrant labour making less than minimum wage. Georgia passes a law making it harder to hire illegal aliens as farm workers and the crop rots in the field. “Americans won’t do this work!” they claim.
It’s bullshit, of course. Pay $10K/tomato, and you could hire Harvard MBAs to pick your crop. It’s not that Americans won’t do it. However, it may be that if you paid enough to get Americans to pick your tomatoes, you could not possibly get other Americans to buy them, because nobody’d pay the 10K/tomato.
In my really grim moments, I wonder if the economy can ever work the way it’s supposed to. There doesn’t seem to be a period of significant industrialization, anywhere, that wasn’t accompanied by some group somewhere being horribly exploited (in India, or Haiti, or in the Confederacy, or in China, or…)
I don’t have any answers, but it’s not a pretty picture.
Elizabelle
@J R in WV: Bravo!
Ruckus
@boatboy_srq:
Thanks for the complement.
I’ve fired lots of people though but it was for work related stuff. Missing work, not because of being sick but being on a bender. Getting stoned in their car at lunch. Although he did better work stoned, and he was very good straight. It led to others thinking working stoned at a dangerous job was OK. Getting stoned in the restroom. OK not really stoned, he could only find sticks and seeds on the street. That’s some of the weird causes, but most were job performance related, they were just bad at the job. It was a high skill craft, you either had it or not. Apprentices didn’t need any skills other than they had to be able to learn.
Being a decent employer is a skill, like most other parts of a job. It’s hard to learn if you only work for assholes or get all your learning out of a book. Or get all your management skills in MBA classes. I was lucky, I had good teachers.
Basic workers still have to eat and have a place to sleep, you don’t give them that they don’t give you their best and it becomes a race to the bottom. That’s why we are where we are as a country today. People are looking for answers and being told any thing but the truth that to be an actual society everyone has to provide for everyone else. That doesn’t mean you share everything but it does mean you pay a fair share. And that doesn’t mean a flat tax, it means those who make the most can afford to pay more and should, they have the most and still will when they pay more. Conservatives think they should have it all, libertarians think it’s every man for himself and there is no society, centrists think, can’t we all just get along. The answer is no.
Chris
@J R in WV:
Good work. Yeah, as many businessmen as I hear whine about unions and regulations, I’ve also read more than a few saying “you’re full of shit. No, the unions aren’t destroying you. You’re just a piss-poor businessman.”
Always thought one of the big reasons for the New Deal’s success was that Roosevelt, having been born and raised inside the 1% East Coast Establishment, knew that world inside and out and knew exactly how full of shit the people screaming about socialism and the destruction of the economy were.
Ruckus
Those that say raising the minimum wage won’t work should study history. Henry Ford raised wages dramatically and it worked, people could buy his crappy car. That it was a relatively cheap car but was made with then high priced labor proved the opposite. Now that was a different time and he didn’t have to go to other countries for the materials to make his cars. He actually controlled most parts of mfg the car, from the steel on. What made it work was the wages he paid. That filtered out and touched every part of most mfg, certainly auto mfg. And it still does today. Those parts of the country paying better wages are recovering faster from the economic disaster fostered upon us. Because those parts have money to spend.
Elizabelle
@Cluttered Mind: The audience isn’t necessarily the FoxBot.
It’s the people in the vicinity who might be reachable and only hear the wingnut crap. Take it down before the wingnut crap becomes the frame and “go to” conventional wisdom.
It’s the other people standing in line at the grocery, or listening to Mr. Small Businessman or Mrs. Church Lady and such a Christian bloviating.
Constant repetition of crap will imprint the crap, even while the conscious mind would repel it.
Ruckus
@Elizabelle:
Madison Ave writ large.
As in location, location, location in real estate, in advertising it’s repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition……..
It doesn’t even have to be good repetition, just the act of repeating places recognition in the mind.
Fred
I’m a retired business owner and the hardest decision I had to make was firing an employee. Even for just cause it is a sad day. To fire someone because they disagree with your opinion and express their thoughts is BS. Also bad business. I hope this ass, Herry Patel gets sacked on general principle.
But then he might lose his house, car, get drunk and beat up his wife, go to jail, get a divorce and have his life ruined. Maybe that’s too harsh. Nah, he thought it was fine to mess up somebody else’s life ’cause he was pissed so screw him. He’s a creep. And a bad manager.
Brachiator
@Lurking Canadian:
Or you would get automation, or tomatoes would be grown overseas and shipped here.
But you are right that some industries seem to depend on exploitation. Food is one area. Clothing is another. Sewing, etc seems to always look for the lowest cost workers, and there is too often long hours, low wages and exploitation.
Yeah, this is a good question. I don’t know the answer to this. But I want to think that there can be some tilt in favor of people and against exploitation.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I think we as a society have emphasized schoolwork, and especially the importance of going to college, to the detriment of hands-on learning. It’s made worse by employers’ attitude that employees are interchangeable commodities who are supposed to be able to walk in and be fully productive their first day at work. Between the two, there aren’t enough opportunities for people to learn job skills on the job.
Brachiator
A couple of perhaps useful links concerning wage stagnation across lower income and middle income wages
http://www.epi.org/publication/stagnant-wages-in-2014/
http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
A nice one page issue summary from Pew:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/
“But after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today.”
Not a pretty picture
Glidwrith
@Belafon: Probably too late to the thread, but my response is “Your intolerance kills”, which is ultimately what the bigots want – the ability to kill without consequence because someone is different.
Cluttered Mind
@Elizabelle: That’s why I argue on the internet. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “Thank You For Smoking” but there’s a great scene where the main character (a lobbyist) is explaining to his son how his job works, and he challenges him to a mock debate about whether chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream is the best. After it’s over, the son says that he doesn’t understand why his father declared himself the winner, since he still doesn’t believe that vanilla is better than chocolate. His father replies that he wasn’t talking to him at all in the debate, he was talking to “them” at which point he gestures around at all the bystanders in the area. So yeah, I do know what you’re talking about and agree, I just think that in private settings where it’s just you and a Foxbot, there is no point.
sharl
@Ruckus:
Yep. You inspired me to seek out the 2004 Daily Show clip Talking Points (2m47s).
Before I found that sought after clip, I came across The Crank Cycle (3m48s), which showed how Fox injected talking points into their audience’s ragey brains, then reported on them asking Fox-implanted questions at town halls:
[This one is reminiscent of the ol’ Dick Cheney – Judith Miller play for getting your memes implanted into public discourse without your own fingerprints on them.]
Note that each of those video clips is preceded by an advertisement (each 30-60s).
Bonnie
@Germy Shoemangler: I don’t understand that attitude because when I was a waitress, my gay and transgender customers were my best tippers. They did not build up a big tab; they paid every round. With each round, I received a 15 percent tip of that tab. At the end of the evening because they usually stayed most of the evening, I had more money in tips than from any other customer all night even the ones who ran up large tabs.
Ryan
Well, her mistake was not choosing rich parents you know.
Bob T
Franchisee of hotel is Dailan inc. the VP is Henry Patel his rich radiologist father Harish Patel is the President. Henry also has a few Subway franchises. Henry has a few rental homes in Melvern AR. This is the classic immigrant tale. Doctor father comes to America makes good and sets up his family. Too bad these people have not figured out that if they do not pay a living wage no one will eat their Subway sandwiches, stay at their motels, or have their X-rays taken.