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JackOLantern1337 Shameful Display from The Most Miserable Province in the Russian Empir Since: Aug, 2014 Relationship Status: 700 wives and 300 concubines
Shameful Display
#117876: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:12:58 PM

I hade a teenage friend of mine who works at one of those places say the same thing, to the point of complaining that his boss has trouble making even as it is.

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#117877: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:13:26 PM

So far, every sign points small businesses, especially the restaurant business, which is one of the biggest opponents of higher minimum wages, being pretty much unaffected by the changes. Small businesses will be able to make adjustments in prices and hours to offset any differences, and save on some of the intangibles such as people moving on elsewhere to try to get paid more, and the cost of rehiring and retraining people over and over for the same position.

The potential snag is that the minimum wage hikes are coming in after almost 40 years of salaries being just about flat, (seriously, since the late 70s wages in the US have barely moved) while everything else has gradually increased during the same time, and businesses have gotten used to the profits that come with being able to pay people so little and continue charging higher amounts for products. That's part of why, for example, CEO pay has grown several hundred times over that same time span while workers have gotten so little. Having to actually start paying workers more is going to be a culture shock for many businesses, and in many cases with big businesses, I doubt the big guys at the top are going to be willing to part with some of their salary or perks to make things flow more smoothly. There's going to need to be more of a culture change than simply changing the minimum wages before that gets worked out.

(For the record I'm not sure if a federal minimum wage of $15 is a good idea, and think there probably needs to be more flexibility involved, especially in areas where general cost of living is lower. NYC, Boston, Seattle, L.A., San Fran, it's certainly necessary, but less so in many other places. That said, even the places where cost of living is very low are probably long overdue for some amount of wage hikes.)

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#117878: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:19:15 PM

It would kill some small businesses, but it would also save and enable others. The smallest ones (say family run ones) would actually benefit, as they often don't pay any wages and as such they would have no extra costs but their customers would have extra money to spend. An age staggered minimume wage (so the minimum wage is lower for under 16s, 16-18s and 18-21s) like we have in the UK could help address youth unemployment and allow some businesses to function at the old minimume wage.

Now the larger small businesses would take a hit short term, some simply wouldn't be viable without access to super cheep labour, but that's the same with anything, some businesses stopped being able to operate when minimum wages (or even wages) were introduced, welcome to capitalism, the hand of the market has spoken and it says that such businesses are failures.

edited 30th Mar '16 6:21:37 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#117879: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:20:30 PM

isn't the restaurant trade the one that refuses to pay it's staff even the most basic wage and attempts to steal any tips they do get?

and Jack, basic capitalism is that if you can't make a profit, you go out of business, something those who oppose minimum wage (often the massive corporations) will be more than happy to tout until they are looking to loose a fraction of their revenue due to having to pay their workers a fair amount

advancing the front into TV Tropes
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#117880: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:22:30 PM

That's probably why it wouldn't be effected, as US restaurants apparently don't pay minimume wage as is.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#117881: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:25:45 PM

I think they do it via liberal interpretation of the law, all that needs to be done is a sold clampdown, when a proper minimum wage, a "living wage" is introduced, change the wording to make it to remove the loopholes, I think Cracked has a few articles on it, I'll try and find them

advancing the front into TV Tropes
AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#117882: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:25:54 PM

Yeah, restaurants frequently get away with paying their employees shit. I mean, fast food workers probably get paid minimum wage because you're not expected to tip on those places, but it's generally considered normal that the customers will just magically give enough tips to make up for the lack of hourly wage. Which frequently doesn't happen. So basically the restaurant industry in this country also needs to be convinced or coerced into paying a wage to start with, not just have the minimum wage raised.

TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#117883: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:27:38 PM

Yep, restaurants get to pay a lower hourly wage as it's assumed that workers will be tipped for service, as is the customer in the US. Restaurants are also absolutely notorious for wage theft, either by taking the tips that workers get or forcing them to spread it out and to other staff such as the busboys and cleaning staff, and that's only the tip of that particularly nasty iceberg.

But yeah, fact is restaurants need to come up to regular minimum wage and the tip reliance system needs to be scrapped.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#117884: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:27:41 PM

For what it's worth, keep in mind that the US is the tipping capital of the world. Waiters and such get surprisingly wealthy just off of tip pay alone.

Leviticus 19:34
FieldMarshalFry Field Marshal of Cracked from World Internet War 1 Since: Oct, 2015 Relationship Status: THIS CONCEPT OF 'WUV' CONFUSES AND INFURIATES US!
Field Marshal of Cracked
#117885: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:34:51 PM

if they don't get tipped one day, or it's a slow day, then they may have to go hungry despite working hours, it doesn't change the fact that they should be paid the correct amount under the law, as a few bad days can fuck everything up if you're living tip by tip

advancing the front into TV Tropes
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#117886: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:47:31 PM

For what it's worth, keep in mind that the US is the tipping capital of the world. Waiters and such get surprisingly wealthy just off of tip pay alone.

If their bosses are decent and honest. If they're not...

Veranda, an upscale Manhattan restaurant, reached a settlement in March 2012 with New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office over its illegal theft of wages from 25 employees. The restaurant paid employees less than the minimum wage, failed to compensate them for overtime work, and cheated them out of tips.10

Two Mexican immigrant busboys, Marco Jacal and Isidro Suarez, were paid no wages at all for their work and had to subsist solely on their share of pooled tips. Then, once a manager began to oversee tip distribution, their meager earnings shrank further. After checking with waitresses, they realized the manager was illegally taking a share for himself. At this point, Jacal and Suarez got in touch with an immigrant advocacy group, Make the Road New York, and subsequently the attorney general’s office.11

After he was sued, restaurant owner Moutaz Ali 12 requested the working papers of his employees (as an intimidation tactic) and shortly retaliated against the two known whistleblowers — first cutting their hours and then firing them. The case settlement required the restaurant to pay restitution of $25,000 to each of the two busboys and $150,000 to the other 23 workers.

Link

Nationwide, these lawsuits have doubled in the last 10 years in federal courts. In New York state, such lawsuits have nearly tripled in the last six years, rising to 1,738 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, compared with 652 in fiscal year 2009, records show.

“The numbers are just scary,” said Carolyn Richmond, a lawyer with two decades of experience representing restaurants. “We started seeing this trend in 2005 and it’s never waned. It’s continued to go up exponentially every year.”

A 2014 study by the U.S. Department of Labor found that wage violations—concentrated mostly in the hospitality industry—result in between $10 million and $20 million of lost worker income a week in New York state.

During the first seven months of this year, the state recovered $11.6 million in unpaid wages in New York City, according to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office.

Last month, Per Se, one of Manhattan’s most expensive restaurants, reached a $500,000 settlement with the state attorney general’s office on charges that the restaurant improperly withheld some tips from employees for nearly two years. And workers who claimed they were underpaid recently reached a $1.4 million legal settlement with celebrity chef Daniel Boulud, head of the Michelin-starred Daniel and Café Boulud.

Link

A new report from Economic Policy Institute reveals the alarming enormity and frequency of wage theft in America. “The country suffers an epidemic of wage theft, as large numbers of employers violate minimum-wage, overtime, and other wage and hour laws with virtual impunity,” University of Oregon economist Gordon Lafer wrote in the report. Especially hard-hit are restaurant workers. The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour — although employers are legally required to pay tipped workers at least minimum wage when tips do not meet the hourly full minimum wage, enforcement is weak and disorganized. According to the study: In 2008, the federal government employed only one workplace inspector for every 141,000 workers. That meant the average employer had just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year. And low-wage workers most likely cannot pay a lawyer to sue their employer for the wages that are rightfully theirs, EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey said in an interview with The Huffington Post. A fast-food worker shorted, say, $300 isn’t going to find a lawyer who thinks such a small amount of wages is worth his or her time. “Employers can be pretty certain they can get away with it,” Eisenbrey said.

Link

El Tequila restaurants in Oklahoma have been ordered to pay $2.1 million to its employees for willfully violating the minimum wage, overtime, and record-keeping provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. El Tequila is a popular Mexican restaurant, with four locations across Oklahoma.

The restaurants violated the FLSA by paying cooks and waitstaff a fixed salary without overtime compensation, paying less than federal minimum wage, misappropriate record-keeping, and misappropriation of tips

Link

Mario Batali’s long-running legal dispute with workers at his New York restaurants, over improperly withheld tips, is almost over. Law 360 reported Tuesday, and publicly available court documents confirm, that Batali and his business partners will settle the class action suit, which began in July 2010, for $5.25 million.

The money represents compensation for what the plaintiffs have described as a pervasive, illegal pattern of tip skimming. They say that Batali’s restaurants, among other misdeeds, took four to five percent of tips given to servers for alcohol and wine sales to pay sommeliers’ salaries.

Settlements from the $5.25 million fund will be available to “all individuals who worked at the Restaurants as captains, servers, waiters, bussers, runners, back waiters, bartenders, and/or barbacks from July 22, 2004 to February 14, 2012, and who do not opt out of the settlement,” according to supporting documentation for the settlement [pdf]. The exact amount due to each plaintiff is determined by the number of hours he or she has worked for the restaurants.

Link

On Tuesday, a New York federal judge granted 42,000 TGI Friday’s workers conditional certification in their collective action lawsuit alleging wage theft.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that they have shown common allegations that the chain restaurant violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by failing to pay them at least the minimum wage and overtime for extra work. Two class action lawsuits were filed last year: one by employees in Massachusetts and another by 17,700 employees in the New York metro area and Fredericksburg, VA.

Both accuse the company of making employees work off the clock without giving them extra pay. In New York and Virginia, workers say they were required to arrive well before the start of business hours and work after the restaurants closed without getting minimum wage and/or overtime pay. They also accused the chain of using a centralized time-keeping system that shaved hours of their work from their records and made them work off the clock doing non-tipped tasks such as cleaning and preparing food in bulk. In Massachusetts, the lawsuit said that workers who put in more than 40 hours a week, the threshold for receiving time and a half in overtime pay, worked any additional hours off the clock. They also say waitstaff were forced to give some of their tips to host staff, who are paid the full hourly minimum wage, reducing the waitstaff’s pay to below the required minimum wage.

The workers are seeking to recover the wages they say they were due as well as misappropriated tips. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Link

A group of restaurant workers allege that restaurant and nightlife entrepreneur Steven Greenberg's posh hot spot, 230 Fifth, misappropriated tips and paid workers less than the minimum wage in violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA") and New York state labor laws.

According to the Complaint filed late Monday, Mr. Greenberg and 230 Fifth, New York City's largest rooftop bar, have "enjoyed great success at the expense of their hourly service workers." The four workers who brought the suit allege that the defendants broke various labor laws by "refusing to pay them the proper minimum wage, refusing to pay them proper overtime compensation, and compelling them to participate in a mandatory tip pool." They also allege that the defendants have "misappropriate[d] 'service charges' and/or mandatory gratuities paid by customers" and have "led customers ... to reasonably believe that such 'service charges' and/or mandatory gratuities were for the workers."

Link

More and more, people want to know where their food and drink comes from. We ask: were these grapes organically grown, or doused with pesticides? Were the cows that make up this burger free to roam the pastures or crammed into overcrowded feedlots?

Less often do we ask about the conditions under which our food is prepared and served to us at our favorite restaurants.

A string of recent lawsuits suggest we should. Flyers recently slapped on lampposts in my neighborhood, the East Village in Manhattan, refer to one of them: three bartenders accuse the owners of downtown wine/tapas spots Bar Veloce and Bar Carrera of skimming up to 30% of their tips, along with failing to pay proper wages and overtime. The flyers exhort locals to think twice before frequenting these bars, along with nearby Porsena and Ugly Kitchen – also owned by defendant Frederick Twomey, who denies the allegations.

It's not just Twomey. Earlier this month, celebrity chef Mario Batali and his business partner agreed to pay $5.25m to settle claims that their restaurants including downtown Manhattan's Babbo and Casa Mono illegally nabbed a portion of servers' and other staffers' tips. Del Posto, another Batali restaurant, faces a separate lawsuit in New York alleging employees were underpaid.

Other New York City eateries sued for similar allegations include Keith Mc Nally's Pastis and Balthazar, which settled for $1.48m; BLT restaurants, which settled for $925,000; and Nobu, which settled for $2.5m.

Link

etc., etc.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
GameGuruGG Vampire Hunter from Castlevania (Before Recorded History)
Vampire Hunter
#117887: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:49:54 PM

Come on, there is an obvious solution... They should be paid minimum wage AND still get tips on top of that. Why can't they get both? tongue

Wizard Needs Food Badly
LSBK Since: Sep, 2014
#117888: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:50:06 PM

I remember hearing (I think from Last Week With John Oliver) that the restaurant industries lobbied in the 50s for a provision that even if there becomes a mandatory minimum wage and/or it ever gets increased they are specifically exempt from it. Or something to that effect.

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#117889: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:53:39 PM

The US is the tipping capital because in other countries workers are paid properly for doing their job, you're not the tipping capital because you're nicer then everyone else, you're the tipping capital because if you weren't you'd have workers starving on the streets.

It's similar to your tax situation, you guys seem to hate the idea of mandating people pay their fair share to cover the cost of things, instead you resort to charity/tipping that people are culturally pressured into and shamed for not doing, you create this illusion of choice behind people paying their fair share.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Protagonist506 from Oregon Since: Dec, 2013 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
#117890: Mar 30th 2016 at 6:54:07 PM

[up][up][up]I think once we give waiters minimum wage, people will start refusing to give them tips.

edited 30th Mar '16 6:54:31 PM by Protagonist506

Leviticus 19:34
TheWanderer Student of Story from Somewhere in New England (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
Student of Story
#117891: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:00:29 PM

People can still tip if someone is a really good server or money is no object to them. I've gotten a few bucks pushed my way at most of the jobs I've worked, and most people are under the impression that waiters get paid more than they really do, so the tips might be less, but odds are the wait staff will be better off regardless.

| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Zendervai Since: Oct, 2009
#117892: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:05:11 PM

I know around here (Ontario) the minimum wage for servers is the same as almost everything else, but you are still expected to tip in restaurants. I think it might be because of cultural spillover from the States. Not tipping though is just kind of rude, not the horrible act it is in parts of the US.

In much Europe, you only tip when the service is exceptional, and in Japan, tipping is considered to be an insult, because you're implying that the business can't be bothered to pay its workers enough.

edited 30th Mar '16 7:06:15 PM by Zendervai

Kostya (Unlucky Thirteen)
#117893: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:07:02 PM

I'm fine with people refusing to tip if workers make decent wages. I only consider tipping mandatory because restaurants are greedy fucks that refuse to pay workers a proper salary. It's the same with Walmart workers on food stamps. I have no issue with them using them being dependent on them because my anger is directed at Walmart.

Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#117894: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:08:30 PM

People won't stop but tips will be reduced. In the rest of the Anglo-Sphere I think you tend to tip but not at US levels (in the UK it's normally 10% at a restaurant or for a delivery driver if you get takeaway) but while not tipping is kinda mean you're not gonna get on a shit list for it (especially if it's takeaway and you paid via card online), on the continent you don't tip at all, but you often get a "bread and service" charge if memory serves.

That's about the standard culture, you still tip for exceptional service, I know that bar staff make plenty in tips over here, plus there's the old "every third trip to bar buy the bar men a drink" thing that I've seen occasionally.

edited 30th Mar '16 7:12:41 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
AceofSpades Since: Apr, 2009 Relationship Status: Showing feelings of an almost human nature
#117895: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:24:04 PM

Protag: there's plenty of people who refuse to tip NOW. At least if restaurants are forced to pay workers their fucking fair share of wages, they won't be utterly dependent on customers being good tippers like they are in the current situation. You've already been effectively countered on the idea that waiters can get rich off of tips alone, so this new point of yours is meaningless.

Iaculus Pronounced YAK-you-luss from England Since: May, 2010
LeGarcon Blowout soon fellow Stalker from Skadovsk Since: Aug, 2013 Relationship Status: Gay for Big Boss
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
#117898: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:31:24 PM

He keeps finding new lows doesn't he?

Oh really when?
Eschaton Since: Jul, 2010
#117899: Mar 30th 2016 at 7:32:04 PM

He just wants to remove the "crime" from "war crimes."

Because that makes it okay, right?


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