Restaurant employees’ union to Burger King: You’re cheating taxpayers.
Romeo to union: Oh, shut up.
Sorry, but I’m really tired of watching the Service Employees International Union and its fellow the traveler, Restaurant Opportunties Center of New York (and now Maine), try to manipulate public sympathy with their preposterous Grassy Knoll take on reality. They twist the facts to turn restaurant employers into the sort of mustachioed villains who once tied matrons to railroad tracks.
This time around, for instance, SEIU is hoping to convince the public that Burger King Holdings is siphoning off some of the federal bail-out funds that were channeled to banks. Follow closely, because this has more twists and turns than a day in Illinois politics.
One of the big stakeholders in BK, the union notes in a statement issued yesterday, is Goldman Sachs. And the one-time broker, now reclassified as a bank, was a recipient of some $10 billion from the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) kitty.
Up to this point, we’re still reality-based. But now the acid kicks in.
The Obama Administration and Congress want more accountability for how TARP dollars are used, notes SEIU. But an additional $273 million of taxpayers’ money is being siphoned off by BK. The Bernie Maddoff-like scheme: Not providing healthcare benefits and paying “sub-poverty wage levels.”
Let me review: BK doesn’t provide health care, which means employees have to find other ways of affording medical attention. A significant stake in the company is held by Goldman Sachs, which was given $10 billion in TARP funds. Ergo, Goldman and BK are cheating the American public.
Follow?
But it gets worse, SEIU says. BK CEO John Chidsey collected $5.4 million in 2008 compensation, including bonuses. Goldman Sachs paid out $6.5 billion in bonuses, the union says. If just the Goldman Sachs performance-based pay had been given instead to BK’s workers, SEIU says, all 360,000 of them would have collected $18,000.
Never mind that BK is a publicly owned company in which Sachs merely holds a stake, albeit a big one. And that BK’s employees aren’t paid by Sachs. Indeed, there’s no flow of money from Sachs to BK, never mind to Chidsey.
I’m not saying that Sachs should have paid big-buck bonuses when it’s collecting government bailout funds. But I’m not sure what that has to do with BK. Might it be because SEIU would like to enlist its employees as members?
Similarly, whether or not BK should provide some type of health-insurance support is a legitimate topic of discussion. If SEIU wanted to start a reality-based conversation on the responsibility of minimum-wage employers, we’d be in a whole different realm. But, here again, it’s just trying to look like the white-hatted cowboy who unties Snidely Whiplash’s knots and frees the maiden from the oncoming locomotive. It’s trying to curry favor by manipulating the facts to make it look like a bravo fighter for right.
Instead, it’s accusing BK and Sachs of “opposing efforts to stop rebuilding the economy” while “taking billions of dollars through taxpayers.”
Why not just accuse the pair of kicking puppies and trying to outlaw American flags?
Showing posts with label Restaurant Opportunities Center. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Restaurant Opportunities Center. Show all posts
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Tip laws draw new scrutiny
Raise a glass in sympathy to the industry’s public affairs officers. It’s bad enough they’ll be rooting for days through Congress’ stimulus package, looking for possible boons to their companies or the business overall. Now there’s the Whack-a-Mole marathon that statehouses commenced last week, with new tip bills popping up faster than peanut product recalls. And if their chain has any restaurants in the U.K., they might as well start pounding the Red Bull right away. Cut with a little vodka, perhaps.
Most of the proposals deal with the tip credit, a provision of wage-and-hour laws that assumes servers earn most of their income in gratuities. In states where a credit is on the books, employers have to pay only a portion of the mandated minimum wage, with the rest coming from what customers leave on the table as tips. Many of the jurisdictions follow federal law, which requires employers to pay tipped staffers only $2.13 an hour, compared with the full minimum of $6.55.
The waiter, waitress or bartender makes no less than he or she would if they collected the full minimum wage—and, indeed, they often make considerably more. Rather, the credit merely allows some of that pay to come directly from patrons.
But movements afoot in states like Maine, Kansas and Missouri aim to change that situation, which has been the norm in all but eight states since the 1980s. Labor proponents say it’s unfair for servers to collect only a small fraction of what their non-tipped colleagues are paid under state wage requirements. Whatever they get in tips, the advocates argue, is icing on the cake, a gift they should be entitled to keep in addition to their hourly pay.
Restaurants, of course, argue that they can’t afford to pay more in wages right now. Some also point out that the traditional tip is 15%, whereas the profit margin for most restaurants is in the single digits, and often under 5%.
Indeed, the trade cited its dire economic conditions in trying, unsuccessfully, to institute a tip credit in Montana. The proposal was just defeated in the state Senate by a 29-21 bipartisan vote.
The industry was more successful earlier this month in Wyoming, beating back a proposal to adjust the tip credit there. The measure would have raised the hourly minimum wage for servers by $3 an hour.
Yet to be decided is a proposal in Maine, where a new union-like group patterned after one in New York City, the innocuous-sounding Restaurant Opportunities Center, is pushing to raise the minimum wage of servers to 60% of the mandated rate for other workers. The current floor for servers is 50% of the full hourly wage.
A measure under consideration in Kansas would raise servers’ minimum to $4.35, from the current $2.13.
In Hawaii, restaurateurs are leading the charge to change the state’s tip credit, which allows them to lower servers’ minimum pay by just a quarter an hour, to $7. They’re arguing that the island state’s laws shouldn’t be out of sync with the pay scale of the mainland, and cite the long and growing list of restaurants that have been shuttered there by the economic freefall.
If you ask me, both sides have compelling arguments, given the state of the economy. There just aren’t enough dollars going into restaurants, so employers and employees are trying to adjust the split in whatever way is most favorable to them. It’s understandable, just not easily resolved.
So let’s hope those public affairs officers find plenty of hopeful indications within the stimulus package. In the meantime, send ‘em a whole bottle of the good stuff. Charge it to the bankruptcy lawyers, whose industry seems to be the only one doing better in this environment.
Most of the proposals deal with the tip credit, a provision of wage-and-hour laws that assumes servers earn most of their income in gratuities. In states where a credit is on the books, employers have to pay only a portion of the mandated minimum wage, with the rest coming from what customers leave on the table as tips. Many of the jurisdictions follow federal law, which requires employers to pay tipped staffers only $2.13 an hour, compared with the full minimum of $6.55.
The waiter, waitress or bartender makes no less than he or she would if they collected the full minimum wage—and, indeed, they often make considerably more. Rather, the credit merely allows some of that pay to come directly from patrons.
But movements afoot in states like Maine, Kansas and Missouri aim to change that situation, which has been the norm in all but eight states since the 1980s. Labor proponents say it’s unfair for servers to collect only a small fraction of what their non-tipped colleagues are paid under state wage requirements. Whatever they get in tips, the advocates argue, is icing on the cake, a gift they should be entitled to keep in addition to their hourly pay.
Restaurants, of course, argue that they can’t afford to pay more in wages right now. Some also point out that the traditional tip is 15%, whereas the profit margin for most restaurants is in the single digits, and often under 5%.
Indeed, the trade cited its dire economic conditions in trying, unsuccessfully, to institute a tip credit in Montana. The proposal was just defeated in the state Senate by a 29-21 bipartisan vote.
The industry was more successful earlier this month in Wyoming, beating back a proposal to adjust the tip credit there. The measure would have raised the hourly minimum wage for servers by $3 an hour.
Yet to be decided is a proposal in Maine, where a new union-like group patterned after one in New York City, the innocuous-sounding Restaurant Opportunities Center, is pushing to raise the minimum wage of servers to 60% of the mandated rate for other workers. The current floor for servers is 50% of the full hourly wage.
A measure under consideration in Kansas would raise servers’ minimum to $4.35, from the current $2.13.
In Hawaii, restaurateurs are leading the charge to change the state’s tip credit, which allows them to lower servers’ minimum pay by just a quarter an hour, to $7. They’re arguing that the island state’s laws shouldn’t be out of sync with the pay scale of the mainland, and cite the long and growing list of restaurants that have been shuttered there by the economic freefall.
If you ask me, both sides have compelling arguments, given the state of the economy. There just aren’t enough dollars going into restaurants, so employers and employees are trying to adjust the split in whatever way is most favorable to them. It’s understandable, just not easily resolved.
So let’s hope those public affairs officers find plenty of hopeful indications within the stimulus package. In the meantime, send ‘em a whole bottle of the good stuff. Charge it to the bankruptcy lawyers, whose industry seems to be the only one doing better in this environment.
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