You can pick up the story here if you’d like, but the basic
concept is simple enough – and much more common in the US than I wish it was.
Two of the Jimmy John’s franchises are being sued by former employers who claim
that the franchise owners routinely required them to work “off the clock”
without pay or other compensation. In practice, this has the effect of lowering
the minimum wage, and therefore the payroll expenses experienced by the
business. Employees are given the choice of working for less money or being
fired, and during bad economic times they may need the job badly enough to put
up with such demands…
It’s unusual to encounter this kind of chicanery in
franchised businesses, since most franchisors have strict rules against the practice
and in some cases can fine the franchise holder or even revoke their franchise
agreement for doing so. People are likely to assume that the company is
complicit in such exploitive practices even if they do realize that the
locations in question are independently owned and operated; if they don’t
realize the locations are franchised they will just assume that the corporation
is screwing its own employees out of their minimum wages. Given that both the
pay and the working conditions offered to fast food employees is already
legendarily bad, no company wants to be associated with making things worse…
What may be getting lost in the shouting here, and is
certainly being ignored in the highly politicized debates over a higher minimum
wage, is the public impact of these wages and working conditions – and specifically,
the fact that an increasing number of minimum wage workers are having to rely
on public assistance just to stay alive. Fast-food companies – or quick-serve
restaurants, to give them their industry title – have some of the highest
operating margins of any major enterprise, and certainly have one of the
highest ratios of how much the CEO makes relative to the average employee.
Unfortunately, they are doing so by paying their employees starvation wages (sometimes
literally) and dumping the cost onto the taxpayers; effectively a massive
public subsidy for fast-food makers at your expense…
Now, I’m not going to suggest that every employee working
far too hard for minimum wage is the head of a household trying to support
multiple dependants on effectively no pay. Many of these positions are held by
students, part-time workers, secondary wage earners in their households, and
other who are not being driven to the edge just to provide a corporate
executive with a larger bonus. My point here is that the fact that this is
happening to anyone is an outrage, and the fact that these companies are
effectively stealing your tax dollars as much as they are from the employees
makes it a public disgrace. Requiring highly-paid employees working under
exempt status to work more than 40 hours a week may be unethical and
counter-productive, but at least it’s legal. Stealing time from your employees
is Grand Larceny, plain and simple, and the people doing it should be charged
as common thieves and prosecuted accordingly…
Dumping these expenses onto the public is effectively
stealing the money that would otherwise be used for fire departments, police
protection, public health, education and other vital services – and I don’t
even have a name for that crime. But anyone who can accept a $20 million or $30
million salary while making his or her employees live on public assistance (or
starve to death) needs to re-evaluate his or her personal values, assuming they
still have any. And all of the people who are dead-set against raising the
minimum wage should probably consider exactly who is paying for that public
assistance, because it certainly isn’t the companies doing the exploiting – or shall
we just call it stealing and have done with it? A crime by any other name…
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