Re: “Restaurant industry scrambles as new minimum wage approaches” [July 17, Business]:
Working a restaurant is a enterprise the place prices akin to meals, hire and utilities are naturally handed alongside to clients. Nonetheless, hysterics all the time accompany the prospect or actuality of a rise within the minimal wage and is accompanied by dire predictions of employers’ incapability to adapt or restaurant closures. Curiously, their opponents will probably be paying the identical wage.
It’s nearly common throughout all companies that employers deal with worker compensation because the one expense of doing enterprise that they need to by no means have to extend. This has been a function of employer/worker relations because the starting of the commercial age. It has been contentious and at instances bloody. The concept staff is perhaps entitled to wages that would offer their households with a good way of life has all the time been a tough promote.
Employers have rejected the idea that the contribution of staff (labor as capital) is as important to their success as their capital funding and as deserving of affordable monetary return.
Jim Thomson, Blaine