Re: “Restaurant industry scrambles as new minimum wage approaches” [July 17, Business]:
Working a restaurant is a enterprise the place prices corresponding to meals, lease and utilities are naturally handed alongside to prospects. Nevertheless, hysterics at all times 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. Apparently, their rivals might 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 characteristic of employer/worker relations for the reason that starting of the economic age. It has been contentious and at instances bloody. The concept workers could be entitled to wages that would supply their households with a good lifestyle has at all times been a tough promote.
Employers have rejected the idea that the contribution of workers (labor as capital) is as important to their success as their capital funding and as deserving of cheap monetary return.
Jim Thomson, Blaine
