Whatever you do, do not come to Washington State on your next vacation. It only encourages them.
Washington’s Minimum Wage to Increase to $9.04 Next Year
Washington’s minimum wage will increase to $9.04 per hour beginning Jan. 1, 2012, the Department of Labor & Industries announced today.
L&I calculates the state’s minimum wage each year as required by Initiative 688, approved by Washington voters in 1998. The 37-cent increase reflects a 4.258 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPIÂW) since August 2010.
No verbal communication skills necessary. No writing skills necessary. No ability to prove you can show up on time and sober necessary. Your first day on the job will net you more in one hour than I made in three hours when I was 16 and washing cars at a Dodge dealership not too many years ago. More than a person with a similar lack of skills in New York, California and Illinois would make in an hour by almost a dollar.
And I have to pay $8 for a Big Mac meal. Before supersizing. Because, apparently, the leftists who run this state think [1] The there is only a set amount of money in the world (duh! inflation comes from somewhere), and [2] That increasing labor costs won’t increase the cost of consumer goods and these newly minted $9-plus per hour lunkers won’t have to deal with the increased cost of goods around the corner from where they earn their checks.
Stay away. Starve the beast.
I’m on medical disability, and have difficulty standing, walking, and even sitting for extended periods. I make $7.06 and have to pay 20% of my Medicare bills.
What is wrong with this picture?
Stay away from Oregon, too. Oregon’s minimum wage is rising from $8.50 this year to $8.80 next year.
The correct answer of course is; the government has no business trying to manage our businesses, and we must find a way to make them stop.
Our businesses are ours, and if some people don’t like that fact, they can beat their heads against a wall, or they can move to a communist country and have everything set up the way they like it. My preference would be they set up their own socialist commune in Guyana, leaving the rest of us alone. But you know the problem– they can never leave other people alone.
guffaw; you have two choices as I see it. You can rely on slavery (other people being forced to serve you) or you can rely on a combination of your own innovation and dedication, family and charity in a free society.
Or, people, you can rely on good business sense and a reading of the wage-hour rules.
If you make something to sell, only those involved directly in the manufacturing have to be wage-earners. All the rest can be “independent contractors” or “management”, and THAT sort does not fall under the Minimum Wage.
Here’s how it would work at a Mickey D’s (which I worked at 50 years ago):
Managers – salaried. Salaries, of course, can be structured with all the different types of compensation so that the money part is smaller.
Cooks – As many Executive Chefs as you can manage, which will be salaried. Just a few wage-earning cooks, which WILL have to earn the minimum wage.
Counter people – They are all Sales Staff, and not only don’t have to earn a wage, they can be paid almost exclusively on commission, and while they are in the various learning phases, their Sales Managers can be paid from over-rides on their commissions.
Janitorial Service – might have to have a wage-person or two here, minimum wage, but could also form a spin-off company to do the clean-up and pay them as Independent Contractors.
As it is, most in Mickey D’s draw wages. That doesn’t have to be the case, and I bet if the numbers were crunched, my system would result in a labor cost reduction of at least 15%, maybe as much as 25%. My guess on why this hasn’t happened is the old concept of “noblesse oblige”, in that the Arches has always been the place of First Jobs, etc, and the Board wants to keep it that way.
Phil, even if my system was adopted, I doubt if you would see the price of a meal drop, because if the corporate barons in Mickey D’s were sharp enough to re-do franchise management this way, they would also be sharp enough to know that it would result in an instant profit for them + the stockholders, and that new profit needn’t be shared – a price war starting up in the fast-food industry would be bad news indeed for the edible-grease barons.