Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster

Re:Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Dis... by Exoristos on Saturday March 16, 2024 @09:24PM (#39731061)

This can and does happen when a law pits one city (or other subset of the nation) against national (or international) corporations. Basically, management will maintain or deploy policy to see the franchisees in this jurisdiction wither on the vine: this contains the legal "contagion" in order to preserve longterm capital.

I daresay if this were a federal regulation evenly administered -- like, say, the 32-hour workweek Sen. Sanders is proposing -- corporations would more likely expend some capital to keep prices reasonable enough to stay in business.

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Re:Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Dis... by kortilla on Saturday March 16, 2024 @10:27PM (#39731409)

Yes, every corporation will try to stay in business. But there are many labor intensive industries operating on thin margins and a rise in labor costs (whether forced by market or regulation), will inevitably push the price high enough to drop demand and hurt the business and completely wipe some out.

Sanders is effectively proposing a 25% raise for everyone. That will definitely destroy a lot of these businesses.

You might say “good riddance, they weren’t good businesses anyway”, which is a fine political opinion. But don’t pretend everyone can drop their work hours by 20% and not have a huge impact on what we produce as a society.

Unless Bernie has a mandate on dropping demand by 20% as well, a bunch of businesses will be destroyed.

[ Parent | on HN ]