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What is fair pay for hospitality workers? : Comments
By Tanel Jan Palgi, published 16/1/2012The real problem in the restaurant industry is the number of exploited workers paid under the table less than award rates.
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A centrally-planned wage structure is never going to please everybody, since it has been arrived at through a series of generalizations, assumptions and compromises on both sides. To imagine that it will not be the direct cause of both sides to complain "we're hard done by" is to ignore reality.
Here we have a worker, complaining that he is badly paid, and that many restaurant owners are flouting the law. We also have a restaurant owner saying that keeping within the those laws is causing him grave management problems, in balancing service in his establishments with the need to make a profit.
The consistent thread is therefore that the law does not work as it is intended. We now need one more contribution, that analyses the law's failures to both sides, and proposes a better solution.
But as we know, actually thinking through a problem and coming up with an answer is far too hard. And anyway, someone else should do it.
By the way, this is not a good look:
"Business owners get hit with these costs, but it is not fair to pass these costs on to workers"
Better by far, I suppose, for the business owner to go out of business entirely, than to pass on the costs of doing business to those involved. Unemployment is clearly being proposed as an attractive option, so long as your principles of fairness are maintained.