How the Minimum Wage Affects Restaurant Hygiene | Hacker News Reader

How the Minimum Wage Affects Restaurant Hygiene

npr.org

25 pointsJudgmentality31 comments

I believe this is the paper being referenced - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2992783

Well yay, I'm really glad I read that. I'll just go ahead and cook for myself forever now.

Have you ever washed your hands in a restaurant bathroom just to be greated by only a hand drying machine and think, "how the hell am I going to get out of here without a paper towel to protect me from touching that dong-germ encrusted door knob?"

I'm starting to see foot-operated door-pulls (e.g., http://www.stepnpull.com/) around Minneapolis.

Increasing minimum wage also increases tax revenue, maybe some of that should be appropriated to the health department to vigorously enforce they law against companies that feel entitled to profit at the expense of harm to others.

I am supportive of higher minimum wages, but I think those who agree should recognize and accept that a business exists to make money. Where one cost rises, a business will find a way to reduce costs in other area. Be it lower quality food, less employees, or in this case, less attention to sanitary conditions. It's too bad a city can't take the radical, opposite step and get rid of the minimum wage all together. That would be a very interesting experiment.

Didn't we already run that experiment in the United States, from its founding up through the early 20th century? In what ways do you suppose things would differ today?

This is a poor study. The "control" of NYC doesn't match Seattle in most every respect, and switching to Bellvue - well, you can read the paper where they say Bellvue followed the state minimums instead of the raises that Seattle implemented, and had the same increase in low-level health violations.

It's a poorly made case of correlation.

This is apparently business owners failing to uphold state required hygienic processes.. which in and of themselves are perhaps too forgiving

But my experience working restaurants shows under paying employees incited a certain apathy in the workers causing lazy implementation of food handling standards

I'd argue more pay makes the workers appreciate their work more which would tangentially result in better hygiene

But for an owner to intentionally 'skimp' on hygiene practices due to 'reallocated profits' is ridiculous

Also the tone is ambiguous, is the intent is the paper that I am supposed to see these dubious correlations of stats and think, 'they were right.. raising the minimum was a bad idea'?

I have to wonder if the restaurants in the study have also attracted new staff as a result of the pay increases ($8 to $13-$15 an hour).

New staff may result in those not fully trained (yet), perhaps a small percentage of new staff feel that certain responsibilities are beneath them, new hires may get dumped with more of the "dirty" work, previous staff dismissed in favor of new staff (for various reasons), etc...

Just saying that there could be other factors are play here.

They sure buried the lede there

"Let me catch up with you. What we're seeing here is the research shows if workers get paid more, to earn the same profit, businesses need to cut on something and where they're cutting is around the edges on hygiene?"

The issue is business owners who want to earn some ridiculous multiple of what their employees do. The haircut should come from their profits.

What is a fair profit for the owner of a small restauraut? Put 500k in to start it. Puts in 70 hours a week. Since you want to say what a fair profit is, what is it? 30k a year? 200k? 500k?

Restaurant profits are controlled by landlords. The rent goes up just to the point where the business survives. Due to the natural shortage of space, this works perfectly for landlords and not very well for anyone else.

What the minimum wage does is create an unmoveable barrier that can't be negotiated away. Minimum wage lowers the maximum rent the landlord can charge without killings the tenant. The wages come out of the landlord's pocket, not the business's.

What about in small rural towns where rent isn't as egregious?

I agree that minimum wages need not be uniform over large geographical areas.

> The wages come out of the landlord's pocket, not the business's.

I was referring to this claim. If rent is a relatively modest expense, how does a minimum wage come out of a landlord's pocket?

Their prices are lower.

> The issue is business owners who want to earn some ridiculous multiple of what their employees do. The haircut should come from their profits.

Profits for most restaurants are razor thin relative to the amount of work the owner puts in and risk taken, so I'm not sure what the relevance of what you're saying is. The average restaurant owner isn't that much better off than their employees.

They do take big risks. The average restaurant in a big city will set you back half a million on the cheap side. But owners are no way on par with employees.

Even when accounting for losses? Employees don't lose money when the business struggles or fails.

Right, but their average pay isn't nearly as good as the business owner's. Most restaurant workers live paycheck to paycheck, have no healthcare, and no leverage. While there is risk involved in being an owner, it's still a much better position to be in than a minimum-wage worker.

It's also a matter of a return on capital vs return on labor. Business ownership can grow exponentially as profits are reinvested. For the worker, though, returns are linear based on hours work. And since they mostly live paycheck to paycheck, they can't exactly invest much free cash without living with their parents or something, which many workers don't.

What percentage of restaurant owners are making more than 60k/year?

People really are finding any way they can to make raising the minimum wage look bad. With rising inequality, a growing lower class, and a shrinking middle class[1], it seems like the business owners are going to grasp at everything they can to pay the lower class less and less each year.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/11/americas-shrinking...

By and large those who oppose it are not evil for the sake of evil but concerned that the alternative is not a higher minimum wage but no wage at all as workers in unskilled jobs are replaced by self-service or automation. McDonalds is already doing it. The answer is using technology as a lever to help people do higher-value-adding work and incentivising people to upskill into those jobs after a brief period at entry level. Not raising the level of entry level so high that it pulls the ladder up.

I say this as someone who started working before the minimum wage even existed, at a fraction of what it was when it was introduced.

I don't believe raising rates will have the damning effect of pushing automation where it is already not going.

A few years ago I saw my first self grocery checkout and the self ordering machine at a&w or the machine to buy tickets at a movie theatre. These things were coming before and shouldn't be part of the discussion where we assign it as the outcome of the wage increase.

The people who complain about it seem to be owners who just complain because complaining is free and any they are against increase whatsoever: http://www.workingwa.org/sky-aloft/2015/tom-douglas

We have the situation in the UK where people on minimum wage get top-ups via the welfare system which makes no sense, I'd like to see an increase sufficient to negate that, because it's just taxpayers subsidising businesses! But £15/hr for unskilled work can't be justified. £9-10/hr is probably about right.

> The answer is using technology as a lever to help people do higher-value-adding work and incentivising people to upskill into those jobs after a brief period at entry level.

Ideally this would happen, but those jobs just aren't opening up for most of the country. Socioeconomic mobility is on the decline[1], and like I showed already, the lower class is growing considerably. The ladder is already being pulled up & automation (and outsourcing) is already occurring, regardless of the current minimum wage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

For a start I say we stop referring to people as lower class, middle class, upper class. It sounds like something out of a 19th century Dickens novel.

Why? And how else would you describe the economic strata that exist in our economy and every other economy in the world?

People are people. We have a classless society in the U.S.. It would be far more correct to refer to differences in income, rather than using the word "class".

Class is an indicator of power, which in our capitalistic society, is largely determined by income or wealth. Using the terms "lower, middle, upper class" mostly does speak of differences in income[1], though the upper class is mostly determined by wealth and a return on capital instead of labor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Sta...

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