Making the rounds on right wing boards

[melm00se]

To All Team Members:

The schedule for next week has been posted. You may notice that hours have been cut back on your schedule. This is across the board, not just you. I don’t want anyone to think they’ve done something wrong to deserve a cut in hours, so I wanted to explain why it’s happening.

There are a couple of reasons for this:

1) May and September are very slow months for our business. Anyone who has worked Sundays recently has seen the drop off in traffic. Now that we’re entering May, that drop off will continue on to other days as well, and it will get worse.

2) The recent increase in the minimum wage to $7.25/hour. Since we’ve opened, I’ve had a lot of people ask why they can’t get more hours, and it’s a great question.

I would LOVE to give everyone all the hours they want, and then some. Our customers would be happier across the board, we could accomplish much more every day, our business would grow, I could hire even more people, and on and on. However, we operate on a tight budget just like any other business, and in order to survive, we have to make money. That means our labor cost (the total amount you are all paid) must stay below a certain percentage of our total sales. If it doesn’t, we go broke and everyone loses their jobs.

Our brilliant Congressmen in Washington, D.C. decided a couple years ago that it would be a good idea to raise the minimum wage by about 40% to $7.25/hour. It just took effect last year. That probably sounds like great news for everyone – more money in everyone’s pockets can only be good, right?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way in the real world. If I’m forced to pay everyone 40% more, I can’t afford to schedule as many employees for as many hours, since our sales aren’t going up by 40%. Remember, I can only afford to pay you guys a certain percentage of all the money coming in the door. That means hours get cut, and everyone ends up poorer.

In a perfect world, it should work the opposite way: you should be free to choose how much you think your skills and time are worth (since you know best), and I should be free to pay you whatever that amount is if I want to hire you. Everyone wins in that case. I get as many good employees as I want that I can afford to pay, and you get valuable job training, references, and relationships to carry into the future.

To prove how bad of a deal minimum wage is for you guys as hard-working job-seekers, just look at this way:

I’m not being forced to pay $7.25/hour; YOU are being forced to accept $7.25/hour no matter what, even if you’d be willing to take less in order to get (or keep) a job.

You can thank our elected officials in Raleigh and Washington for sticking you with such a raw deal.

If you have any questions about any of this or want to talk more about it, please feel free to come see me, the door is always open.
===========================================

be prepared for this to become a water cooler talking point.

[WeDidIt]

1. Cheap Labor Republican Talking points

Republicans would be happiest if they could just enslave labor.

$7.25/hour is not a living wage. It's starvation wages and any fuckhead who wants to pay less than that simply wants to be a slave owner.

[Cleita]

7. Even the slaves had to be fed and housed.

These idiots don't think they even have an obligation to do that.

[HughMoran]

2. Except I'd bet a grand it's fabricated

:thumbsdown:

Edit: oh, and if it is real, I won't believe it until I see which business this is. Then you can be sure I'll never go in there, ever. If it's a single entity I don't care anyway - I have no use for businesses run by morons.

[Morning Dew]

3. Utter bullshit.

"In a perfect world, it should work the opposite way: you should be free to choose how much you think your skills and time are worth (since you know best), and I should be free to pay you whatever that amount is if I want to hire you. Everyone wins in that case. I get as many good employees as I want that I can afford to pay, and you get valuable job training, references, and relationships to carry into the future."



Wow, what a great deal. If I wanted to work for 3.62 / hour, I could work 80 hours a week.

[WeDidIt]

5. It's Randian bullshit

An aristocracy takes over the means of production.

It's blatant talking points to push labor into serfdom.

[zipplewrath]

4. Is "he" making $7.25/hr?

It would be interesting to know who wrote this, and what he is making. He talks about May and September being slow months and cutting hours. Yet he talks about wanting to increase the number of employees and how it would make his business grow. But his business isn't really "growing" if all he's doing is driving down the cost of labor. He'd be selling more and more for less and less until he was making nothing on an awful lot of sales.

[safeinOhio]

6. It's the Republican 10,10,10 plan to increase employment

10 cents an hour for 10 year olds to work 10 hours a day. Make cents to them.:puke:

[CrispyQ]

8. To All Team Members:

Those willing to take a $3 an hour paycut will be scheduled as many hours as they want.

:eyes:

Cheap fucking bastard. At 40 hours a week, $7.25 is $15,080 per year. Wonder what this business man pays himself?

[izzybeans]

9. These are the words of an incompetent business owner.

end message.

[LAGC]

10. Republican employers want to be able to pay $1 per hour if they could get away with it.

Race to the bottom...

[johnaries]

11. $7.25 is still slave wages, but if he is paying them 40% more

then they can afford to work 40% fewer hours to make the same amount. Unless they count on overtime, but being forced to work overtime each week in order to make a living is absolutely ridiculous. People need time with their families.

[HughBeaumont]

12. Well, then you shouldn't be in business, Super-Cheeto.

I mean, did Republicans in the business world think they were going to get away with paying their workers the same 1979 real-dollar wage forever and ever and think there would never be backlash, repercussions or economic damage? Did they really THINK that?

If you want to keep your precious consumer capitalism going, you have to pay your workers a wage which allows them to live and purchase. I know you don't want to hear that, but them's the breaks, G. Why do you THINK you're having no business or slow months? Could it be that your fellow selfish compatriots are ALSO cheap-labor bastards whose workers ALSO have no spending income or savings? Could it be that your workers are too busy trying to pay the ever-increasing cost of living with a stagnant-to-decreasing real-dollar wage?

Workers cannot buy products or give you business if you ain't paying them. Multiply this by thousands upon thousands, and you got yerself a real problem on your hands.

Economics 101, schmucks. I know you think it's all about you, but it's NOT.

[ljm2002]

13. The part that cracks me up...

...(paraphrasing) I'd LOVE to give you more hours, but the damned government makes me pay $7.25/hour minimum wage. So you can only work 30 hours. Whereas, if I could pay you the $5.45/hour I was paying before, you could work a full 40 hours and make the same amount of $$$. Dang the gummint anyway... You should write to your Representative and tell them you want to work a full 40 hours, dammit!

Does that about cover it?

[socialist_n_TN]

14. THIS kind of "business" attitude.....................

is the reason that MY personal priority in leftist politics is worker's rights. Yes, everything else (enviroment, gay/lesbian issues, immigration, etc) is important, but WE ARE ALL WORKERS. WE, as workers, PRODUCE the wealth and we should have some say over said wealth.

[Iggo]

15. Same shit, different year.

I remember back when it was the end of the fucking world because it went from like $2.65 to $3.15.

Always the same arguments and the sun keeps coming up in the morning.

[Liberal In Texas]

16. This idea RW lemmings have that companies hire people as some kind of

charity is crazy. Companies only hire enough people to cover what needs to be done. They don't hire "extra" people because the have some "extra" cash left over from paying the other employees less.

If they need 10 people to run a shift, they'll hire 10 people and a few bucks more per hour isn't going to bankrupt the company; or if it's going to it's a really poorly run company that's going to go under anyway. Companies normally will pay better than minimum to get better quality workers that won't jump ship at the drop of a hat. High turnover is very unproductive and most companies know that.

This illusion the RWers have that if everybody gets paid less, the company would hire 12 or 15 per shift instead of 10 is just plain nuts.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

19. If they need 10 people to cover a shift-

-lots of times they'll hire 8 and work them harder.

This has been my experience working for companies that have 'downsized'. Reducing the workforce will always be preferable to an executive pay cut (and sometimes results in larger executive bonuses).

(Downsizing= same amount of work done by fewer and fewer people. Stability is achieved when one employee does the work of the entire company.)

[Kalyke]

17. I wonder why the name of the company was left off.

If it's real - provide me the proof in the email headers so I can see that it came from a manager at XYZ company to all employees. Just sticking "Raleigh" in it doesn't mean a thing (other than, I doubt it came from there - Raleigh's a pretty liberal area of North Carolina where people expect to pay decent compensation).

Since it's just a bunch of gibberish from no one in particular, I'll take it on good faith that it's either not true or the person who wrote it obviously doesn't really car about employment laws.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

18. You hear this same shit from the Republicans every time the minimum wage goes up.

I doubt if this was actually written by a real business owner (although I'm sure many of them share the sentiment) It was more likely written by some troll who "understands how things actually work in the real world" and is probably pissed off that the cost of having his pool cleaned has gone up.

[melm00se]

20. I *think*

this is the original source (I did some some googling) but am not 100% sure:

http://cafehayek.com/2010/04/an-entrepreneur-and-the-minimum-wage.html