excerpt: It is a cruel irony that many of the 13 million men and women who produce and serve the food in my industry are forced to use food stamps to feed themselves and their families. The average, full-time, fast food worker earning $7.25 an hour makes $15,080 a year, 20 percent below the poverty rate for a family of three. Contributing to this situation is the fact that the subminimum wage for tipped workers has been frozen at $2.13 per hour for more than two decades. In the absence of meaningful action from industry groups like the National Restaurant Association to alleviate this crisis, I believe, as a restaurant owner and food service entrepreneur, we need to raise the federal minimum wage now. Our success at Zingerman’s with over 30 years of operating and opening food-related businesses was not achieved by underpaying or withholding benefits from our employees. From day one, my sixteen partners and I have paid wages above the federal minimum and offered company-subsidized health care and paid time-off. We have never considered these critical costs of doing business obstacles to profitability or our annual compounded growth rate of 10 percent. I reject the argument put forth by many in the restaurant industry that livable wages and profits are mutually exclusive. Our experience at Zingerman’s proves exactly the opposite and I am not convinced we are exceptions to any rule. To prove taking the high road is viable, the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor has joined RAISE, an alternative restaurant association of successful establishments all across the nation, and we are honored to partner with businesses, like DC’s Busboys and Poets, Detroit’s Russell Street Deli, Chapel Hill’s Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe among nearly 100 others, who are committed to a “high-road” approach to labor practices. Our success stands in direct opposition to the false claims about livable wages and profits that have dominated the debate for decades. We are uniting to prove to the rest of the industry investing in our employees has been a driving force to our growth and success, not an impediment. To those who argue raised menu prices will result in loss of customers and diminished profits, I question the scale of your profit margins and wonder who is shorted to maintain those margins — is it your employees? Yes, menu prices could increase. A study by the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center found raising the minimum wage (as proposed in the current Fair Minimum Wage Act) would only cost the consumer an extra dime a day, and that’s assuming employers pass 100 percent of the extra cost onto customers. This is not a compelling argument to me against making the choice to pay workers a higher wage. The benefits we’ve seen at Zingerman’s from investing in our employees far outweigh the “liability” of charging higher prices. From The Detroit News: detroitnews/article/20130919/OPINION01/309190010#ixzz2g1veVcjm
Posted on: Thu, 26 Sep 2013 19:50:49 +0000
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