More proof of Rethuglican lies
From Business Insider.
Business owners say they're struggling to find staff. Not so the CEO of &pizza, a restaurant chain in Washington, DC, who claims that he's been bombarded with job applications.
Michael Lastoria told Insider that business was booming at the pizza chain's 51 locations and all were fully staffed. He said that the secret was paying staff a proper wage.
The crippling US labor shortage has been felt in all corners of the economy, including hospitality and ride-hailing. It's caused some businesses to slash opening hours, cut production, and raise prices. Nearly half of US restaurant owners said they struggled to pay their rent in May because staffing shortages hurt their revenues.
But it hasn't knocked &pizza, Lastoria said.
While opening 12 new locations this year, Lastoria said he'd received well over 100 applications for each job. "Our new locations are fully staffed and we plan to open another 15 by the end of the year," he said.
Lastoria said he'd been able to dodge the labor shortage by leveraging an employee-centric business model that involves paying staff $16 an hour on average, among other benefits.
"We are living proof that the claims that business owners are making about the impossibility of paying people enough money to live on are false," Lastoria said. Those claims were designed to protect the old corporate mindset that permits shockingly high executive pay and staff exploitation, he said.
Employees working at &pizza are entitled to benefits such as paid leave for activism and healthcare, Lastoria said. "We built this company around taking care of workers because without them we wouldn't exist," he said.
The fact that the average minimum wage worker has to work 79 hours a week to afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment is the real crisis, Lastoria said. [B]"There isn't a labor shortage, there is a shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage."[/B].
"The idea that wages couldn't possibly rise even once over the past 12 years while prices went up, while inflation went up and while the cost of living went up, has resulted in the 'shortage' {business owners} are experiencing today.
"Higher wages lead to greater consumer spending and greater workforce productivity, things every company benefits from. "
A competitive labor market has led to workers "rage-quitting" their jobs to protest poor pay and working conditions. A former employee at Dollar General recently told Insider how she rage-quit her job in the spring of 2021 because of the fraught work environment. Similar incidents have occurred at McDonald's, Chipotle, Hardee's, and Wendy's locations around the US.
Lastoria said: "If you aren't paying your employees enough to cover basic survival costs, what possible incentive could a person have to take that job?
Repubs have been lying about this since at least the 1920's
[QUOTE=PVMonger;2578970]From Business Insider.
Business owners say they're struggling to find staff. Not so the CEO of &pizza, a restaurant chain in Washington, DC, who claims that he's been bombarded with job applications.
Michael Lastoria told Insider that business was booming at the pizza chain's 51 locations and all were fully staffed. He said that the secret was paying staff a proper wage.
The crippling US labor shortage has been felt in all corners of the economy, including hospitality and ride-hailing. It's caused some businesses to slash opening hours, cut production, and raise prices. Nearly half of US restaurant owners said they struggled to pay their rent in May because staffing shortages hurt their revenues.
But it hasn't knocked &pizza, Lastoria said.
While opening 12 new locations this year, Lastoria said he'd received well over 100 applications for each job. "Our new locations are fully staffed and we plan to open another 15 by the end of the year," he said.
Lastoria said he'd been able to dodge the labor shortage by leveraging an employee-centric business model that involves paying staff $16 an hour on average, among other benefits.
"We are living proof that the claims that business owners are making about the impossibility of paying people enough money to live on are false," Lastoria said. Those claims were designed to protect the old corporate mindset that permits shockingly high executive pay and staff exploitation, he said.
Employees working at &pizza are entitled to benefits such as paid leave for activism and healthcare, Lastoria said. "We built this company around taking care of workers because without them we wouldn't exist," he said.
The fact that the average minimum wage worker has to work 79 hours a week to afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment is the real crisis, Lastoria said. [B]"There isn't a labor shortage, there is a shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage."[/B].
"The idea that wages couldn't possibly rise even once over the past 12 years while prices went up, while inflation went up and while the cost of living went up, has resulted in the 'shortage' {business owners} are experiencing today.
"Higher wages lead to greater consumer spending and greater workforce productivity, things every company benefits from. "
A competitive labor market has led to workers "rage-quitting" their jobs to protest poor pay and working conditions. A former employee at Dollar General recently told Insider how she rage-quit her job in the spring of 2021 because of the fraught work environment. Similar incidents have occurred at McDonald's, Chipotle, Hardee's, and Wendy's locations around the US.
Lastoria said: "If you aren't paying your employees enough to cover basic survival costs, what possible incentive could a person have to take that job?[/QUOTE]Excellent report and post.
Many people think this Republican Party idiocy about how a complex national economy succeeds and thrives rather than fails miserably started with Reagan. No, it started relatively soon after Henry Ford's assembly line mass production concept got into full swing and the idea spread to other industries.
Like the pizza shop owner, Ford understood the key to watching the sales of his product and the products and services of every other industry around his grow and expand, improving his and everyone else's life along the way, was to pay his workers a wage big enough to live on comfortably and, most importantly, with enough left over to buy his product! If that meant he lived high as a wealthy man making only 35-50 times what his employees made instead of as an even wealthier man making 350 times what his employees made, so be it. That is how he made sales skyrocket. There are only so many steak dinners he could eat in a single sitting anyway.
But the wrongheaded Repub concept is to rail against raising the minimum wage, give the already wealthy every leverage to dodge regulations, pay dirt wages, give them disproportionately high tax cuts if they pay any taxes at all and this mythical "Supply-Side/Trickle-Down" miracle will occur. Supposedly, when one of the super wealthy eats 20 steak dinners in a single sitting, well, look at how much business the local butcher shop owner will get just from that one wealthy customer and then the butcher shop owner buy 4 yachts next summer instead of one and the yacht manufacturer will make enough money to buy 6 private planes next year instead of just 2 and gee look at all the money trickling down to everybody. LOL.
Except not even that happened after every Repub attempt to prove that it'll work out thay way someday. Nope. Instead, we got one Great Repub Economic Crash, Depression and Recession after another since the 1920's, only highlighted under Reagan because his was one of the biggest economic declines until Dem Speaker of the House Tip O'neill convinced that addle-brain babbler to abandon his spectacularly failed agenda and start raising some revenue or the entire USA Economy would collapse. Of course, being a Repub he raised it on the wrong people. But it was better than where his "Reaganomics" had taken the country.
Repubs have been making that same mistake so often and with the same disastrous results one can no longer see their consistent economic Crashes as "mistakes." They can only be intentional.
But, hey, Trump saved the country a measly $100 million or so by defunding the CDC, pulling out our front line monitors and responders to threats of viral spreading from China's research labs (too much "regulation" no doubt) and gave massive disproportionate tax cuts to corporations that did not prevent one USA job of the millions lost from being destroyed when the inevitable that Trump was fully warned could happen did indeed happen. Brilliant.