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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Summary: My furloughed employees refuse to take a pay cut and risk death so that I can reopen my business and make money.

In the article it says his cooks start at $15 + $1 in tips. Currently with the extra $600 they are making $25.40 per hour. If he wants them to come back he is essentially asking them to gamble their guaranteed unemployment income on his business doing well in this time. On top of that he asking them to literally risk their lives. I see no reason that he should not take the additional financial and physical risk he is asking his employees to take into consideration when hiring them back. Offer them $30 an hour with a guaranteed minimum number of hours in writing. Labor in a very limited sector is a limited resource for once, employees should take advantage of it. Isn't that what capitalism is all about?

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One of the things I think that's interesting (a potential ticking time bomb) about the "forgivable small business loans", is that they have to have their payroll back to 100% and wages AT LEAST 80% by June for the money to be forgiven.

Employees can refuse to return to work for fear of the virus and still get unemployment til later than that date.

Feels like it's going to be awfully hard getting employees back to work at less than $25/hour.

A lot of businesses could be stuck with loans when they thought they were getting "free" money.

honestly the entire country would have been better off with just giving every adult in the US 2k a month for 6 months. Would have cost about 2.5 trillion. Country could have been safely shut down, everyone would have been able to cover their bills. When the country reopens, everyone would have money to burn which would have flowed into businesses.

Spend another 2 - 3 trillion on true small business loans / grants. Forbid stock buy backs in the future.

McConnell has also indicated he has no interest in giving states any more money for unemployment. So desperate people are going to be even more desperate soon.

What the federal government has done instead is an abomination aimed at falsely propping up share prices. We are very possibly looking at the onset of a massive depression spurred on by just plain poor crisis management at the federal level.

It's not quite that simple.

If you give people $2k and businesses nothing, people aren't going to spend that money on businesses. They're not allowed to do a lot of things they usually spend money on. Retail, restaurants, hotels, live entertainment, airlines, movie theaters, etc would go bankrupt en masse. I'm not sure that's actually a problem. The responsible businesses that had cash would buy the poorly managed businesses at a discount. Long term, this could possibly lead to even worse inequality. Not to mention, a lot of the jobs might be destroyed permanently.

I do agree that I think it would've been better for most people to only give people the money. There would still be a lot of losers.

On the simplest basis, most restaurants and hotels are small businesses. The majority of them would lose their business. $2k would do nothing for them. And the majority of these business owners are decidedly not rich.

I do agree, but note I did say another 2 - 3 trillion in small business loans / grants. Is that enough? I am not sure, but I do agree that if not managed correctly much like the housing crisis those with cash will swoop in and buy the distressed businesses. I just don't see how what we are doing currently is going to prevent that though. The white house is actively picking winners and losers in the business world with almost no congressional oversight and has fired the IG responsible for it.

So he fired them, and now wants them to come back in exchange for a pay cut and potential death.

In addition, cooks legally can't be paid tips, so he's ripping off his servers (and I'm guessing cooks as well).

You’re right.

Even if he did for some reason want to go back to work, what guarantee does he or the business have that people will show up? On my Facebook timeline (mostly people in GA) there seems to be a universal feeling from both my liberal friends and staunch Trump true believers that they aren’t going to take any chances when it comes to being in crowds.

Agreed. The extra $600/week is going to run out long before the restaurant industry recovers.

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