Minimum Wage is a Violation of Employers' First Amendment Rights
No, this isn't from The Onion or a Saturday Night Live skit. The International Franchise Association has filed a lawsuit to overturn Seattle's new $15-per-hour minimum wage.
Here's another link.
According to this group's legal “reasoning,” Seattle's new minimum wage violates the First Amendment because “by increasing the labor costs of franchisees, the Ordinance will reduce the ability of franchisees to dedicate funding to the promotion of their businesses and brands.”
That's right. Why should business owners spend their hard-earned money to pay wages to the hired help — those lowly peons should STFU and just be grateful they still have jobs — when they could be spending this money to enrich themselves and promote their own companies? And don't forget, when these employers are able to accumulate lots and lots of money (at everyone else's expense), some of this money will trickle down onto us little folks. Everybody wins.
As the 2nd linked article says, if this lobbying group's argument had any legal merit:
“...then any law imposing costs on anyone would be unconstitutional, including all taxes. After all, every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar that can’t be spent to buy an ad promoting the deliciousness of the Big Mac.”
Another complaint of this lawsuit is that Seattle's minimum wage increase has different compliance schedules for large and small businesses. Large companies (500 or more employees) will have to start paying $15 an hour by 2017. Smaller businesses don't have to comply until 2021. This double standard is totally unfair, and we all know that fairness is the number one priority of corporate lobbyists.
Labels: International Franchise Association, Seattle minimum wage
posted by Tom Harper @ 2:12 PM
7 Comments:
we all know that fairness is the number one priority of corporate lobbyists
First amendment rights? Do they have a straight face as they spout this nonsense?
Seriously?
2017? By then everyone will be homeless.
Life: This definitely doesn't pass the smell test, or the straight face test or whatever they call it.
Mr. C: LOL. Problem solved.
San Jose and the city are looking to do this too. I smell ALEC all over this one. Seems 1st amendment rights is the new go to thing when people don't like what is happening. See Hobby Lobby as a recent example of it with their, we don't want to give the ladeez slut pills but our retirement mutual funds invest in companies that make the slut pills. You would think they could reason that one out and figure the more the ladeez take the pills, the more money they get into the retirement account. Logic fail by the Bible thumpers.
Jess: Oh, I thought you knew -- the Constitution was written exclusively for corporate VIPs and religious control freaks.
Invest in slut pills and then be shocked and outraged that people are using those same slut pills -- yup, that's Biblehump "logic."
Did you know that Warren Buffet is a franchise owner? He owns more Burger Kings then Burger King! I posted about this years ago, how a Reagan era law helped small, single, family business face the competition with Subsidies, Tax Breaks, SBA Preference on Loans and Limited wage breaks - got usurped during Clinton when Gingrich amended the program to include franchises (the one thing the program was supposed to protect the family owner against). Gingrich and co. claimed this program discriminated against Franchises (sound familiar?) As they are poor community one owner, businessmen sponsoring little league teams and making ends meet like the rest. So the program was expanded to include the franchise and then guys like Buffet and Bain Capitol bought up stores like crazy and “Guess what?” get the same breaks and subsidies that the single franchise, and the family store man get. Buffet is no fool, he can earn an hefty turn by turning over thousands of employees every year so can take advantage of the lower wage program. And he can build a new store of a SBA store and not spend a dime of his own money. If he fails (and according to the SBA franchises have the largest failure rates of SBA loans) You and I eat the cost.
Keep this in mind when they say the minimum wage is hurting them. BTW this is JUST the federal program, doesn’t say what they might get from local development and enterprise zones, State and local subsidies etc.,
Erik
Erik: I didn't know about that, or maybe I knew at the time and then forgot. It's not a bit surprising. Giant corporations are expert at finding every loophole where they can disguise themselves as "the little guy," a local mom and pop enterprise, and reap all the benefits and advantages that were intended to help local small business owners.
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