When did reality become an editor for The Onion?
SoâŚblack people just need to form a corporation?
I canât remember the last time I ate at McDonaldâsâŚ
⌠and itâll be a cold day in Hell before the next.
Iâll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one. And Iâll believe money is speech when someone tries to shout me down with it. (the first is stolen from a t-shirt, the latter is my own)
This looks like a textbook example of the Law of Completely Intended Consequences.
What is the actual argument/problem? The closest this fluffy article gets to anything of substance is noting that âAccording to the Hamburglar, treating a franchised business differently from a local business violates this Equal Protection Clause.â.
Does the new minimum wage only apply to franchised businesses and not local businesses? (If so then why is it being called a âminimum wageâ?) That would be a legitimate grievance (the minimum wage should cover all workers) but is it the case? In what way is the minimum wage (supposedly or genuinely) not really the actual minimum?
I think you have that backwards.
The law is being phased in differently depending on number of employees. Small businesses have much longer to adopt the new wage (years). In my opinion nobody should get a break, Seattle needs 15 now, no exceptions.
âŚnew ad campaign : People leaving their shitty McJobs, for better futures. Tag it with âThis job ? Iâm Shoving It.â
Someone clever make that happen for me, 'kay ?
Thanks. Youâre super, Cory.
That about sums it all up for meâŚ
PS. That crap they call âFOODâ is poisonâŚ
With apologies to Lincoln: When I hear anyone arguing for lower wages, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Well, itâs a little more subtle than this article implies. The issue has to do with treating employers with fewer than 500 employees as âlargeâ employers if they happen to be part of a franchise. True franchise operators operate fairly independently from one another. I think there is an argument to be made as to whether McDonalds is really operated as an independent franchise or not. But it does seem sort of unfair to say that a 5 employee company is a âlargeâ employer if they have a business arrangement with a chain, while a 499 employee company is âsmallâ if they do not.
That this is being argued as a 14th Amendment issue, however, is ridiculous.
Itâs important to first note that McDonaldâs is not filing suit here. The named individual plaintiffs (you can find the complaint here; itâs linked in the HuffPo piece) are franchisees of large chains, and none of them own a McDonaldâs location. Neither McDonaldâs corporate, nor any named McDonaldâs franchisees, have anything to do with this lawsuit. Itâs conceivable that some McDonaldâs franchisees are indirectly contributing toward legal fees because they are members of the International Franchisee Association, which has sued on behalf of its membership, but McDonaldâs has nothing to do with this suit. Itâs a Comfort Inn owner, a Holiday Inn Express owner, the owner of a printing company franchise, and the owners of a home health care franchise. These owners sue in their personal capacities as persons who own businesses, not as âcorporate persons.â
The 14th Amendment argument hinges on the classification of their businesses. The Seattle ordinance says that large businesses (more than 500 employees) have to roll out the higher minimum wage several years before small businesses (less than 500 employees). Seattle classes the franchisees, each of whom indisputably employ less than 500 people, as âlarge businesses,â because even though they are legally separate from the franchisors, there are more than 500 people employed by the whole network of franchisees (i.e., anyone who is employed by a Comfort Inn franchise nationwide counts toward the total, not just the people employed by one ownerâs single hotel). The claim, then, is that the franchisees are denied equal protection of the law vis-a-vis other businesses that employ the same number of people; they claim it violates the 14th amendment to treat them as owners of much larger businesses when they indisputably employ fewer than 500 people. I think itâs an interesting argument, but Iâm not sure how successful it will be.
But for a lawsuit that has no McDonaldâs anywhere near it, Iâm interested in BoingBoing and HuffPo making it all about the Golden Arches.
So if corporations are people then owning a corporation is slavery which is banned?
Sadly we all have been shouted down many times with money.
Thereâs a Forbes article thatâs much more informative: http://www.forbes.com/sites/caroltice/2014/06/03/franchise-group-to-sue-over-seattles-15-an-hour-minimum-wage/
TL;DR: Itâs not McDonalds directly, and the suit is claiming that itâs unfair that under-500-person companies who arenât franchises get to drag their feet on raising the minimum wage, while franchises donât get to, even if theyâre not receiving support from the mothership.
The fact that they can use that branding at all is support from the mothership. Do they honestly think theyâd have the credibility and traffic they do if they just setup âRed-and-Yellow-Clown-burgerâ instead of McDonalds?
The definition of âslaveâ is a person who is owned by one or more other people.
All corporations are, legally, people.
All corporations are owned by other people, generally in the form of shares.
So, technically, stockholders are slave ownersâŚ
I think there is also an argument to be made that an operation the size of McDonaldâs has a pretty good grasp of their cost basis and should be able to factor a âliving wageâ to their pricing structure.
