Restaurant workers quit at record rate

"If they can't give a decent wage [1] then they were not a viable business to begin with"

Yep. 1000%. If your workers need to be on any form of government assistance, you're being subsidized.

Mr. Factory Owner does all sorts of bullshit like paying unlivable wages, not having any employees working over the number of hours at which they'd have to pay benefits, and so on.

But guess who's always got enough money to donate to republican and libertarian campaigns, and has very strong opinions about 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' and how wasteful government assistance is?

Enforcement isn't a farce, its just focused on workers because employers are powerful and workers aren't.

The reason republicans are so hardline on immigration is because "illegal" workers are really easy to coerce and exploit.

They don't call the health department when you make them shit in a hole in the field. They don't call OSHA when you deny them access to water out in the field. They don't call the attorney general when you pay them by what they pick, or only start counting their hours after they've walked half an hour to the field they're picking, and stop paying them the second they stop picking instead of when they get back to their vehicle...because you're too cheap to provide a truck or bus and they'll walk for free. They don't call the police when one of the supervisors smacks them around for accidentally damaging some equipment. Etc.

You would be surprised. I've lost count of the number of small businesses I've seen where employees go unpaid or are underpaid to 'save the business' while the boss makes no such sacrifices.

Had to help a number of people applying to the local equivalent of a labour small claims court.

> I would rather have nothing but chain restaurants owned by megacorps than have people working for less than a living wage.

Those megacorps do everything they can to pay as little taxes as possible and get as much money out of the country as they can in the form of off-shore corporations that hold the trademarks for said corp, the US subsidiary of which pays it massive 'licensing' fees.

They're also the worst at keeping money within a local economy. They use other large corporations as much as possible for 'efficiency', but it has the side effect of meaning that said business doesn't spend money for services anywhere in the local economy. Joe Drain Buster doesn't get business from Five Guys having a grease clog; some nation-wide plumbing services company does. Maybe they contract out Joe Drain Buster, but not before taking their cut.

It gets worse. The larger the employer the easier it is for that employer to grift the local, county, state, and federal government for freebies, tax breaks, eminent domain gimmes, friendly legislation and regulations, etc.

Witness: Amazon and Walmart. Companies that generated a handful of people with unimaginable wealth who fight tooth and nail to treat their employees like shit.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $200BN as of a month ago. The average network for a resident of Mississippi is slightly over $17,000. That means it would take roughly 11.5M Mississippi residents to equal his net worth.

Mississippi has 3M residents.

My state gave restaurant owners a billion dollars during the pandemic. A billion dollars.

During the pandemic, restaurants lobbied hard as hell against restrictions and cheated at every opportunity what restrictions they were obliged to follow. Our governor ordered bars to be shut down around 9pm during a surge last year and everyone joked that was great because it meant apparently the 'rona only came out to infect people after 10pm.

I really wanted to meet a prospective date and we wanted to be as safe as possible. We scoured websites, google, and and social media for information about outdoor seating accommodations. Whatever information was available was exceedingly vague, despite it being a year into the pandemic when you'd think any savvy business owner would have information like that readily available. When restaurants had outdoor seating listed as available, most of them had seating fees and some insane minimum order requirements.

Fuck the restaurant industry.