Joni Balter has a column ostensibly arguing against the proposed Seattle mandatory sick leave (h/t).
But the idea of city government mandating paid sick leave, especially while small businesses try to recover from severe economic woes, is overbearing and tone deaf. If anyone is going to lead us out of the recession, it’s small businesses. This is the last thing they need.
Totally, let’s blindly trust business to do the right thing. For the economy’s sake. Also, there’s probably a public health concern here. Both with other employees and with the people those sick employees have to interact with (do you really want your waiter to have strep throat and no sick leave?). But anyway, it’s been done in several cities, how can we learn from their example? Did it hurt businesses? Were there measurable public health differences? Other consequences?
City Councilmember Nick Licata, who is proposing the idea, says San Francisco did something similar and did not experience a negative economic impact.
OK fine. Now, Joni, instead of addressing that please complain about the existence of San Francisco for like 3/4 of your opinion piece about sick leave?
Another proponent of the plan said, in essence, San Francisco is doing this, why shouldn’t we?
Good start, keep going!
For years, San Francisco has been the punch line for goofy liberalism. Citizens and government there do a lot of off-the-wall things Seattle need not emulate. This city decided to officially expand the name of pet owners to include pet guardians. More respectful, you know. In fact, Seattle should ban the argument that San Francisco is taking certain action and therefore Seattle should follow suit.
So your argument against mandatory sick leave in Seattle is that San Francisco calls pet owners “guardians.” Of course. Surely something about Happy Meals will seal the mandatory sick leave deal.
San Francisco has also effectively banned Happy Meals, or at least the toy given with meals that exceed set levels of calories, sugar and fat. I did not feed my children Happy Meals. I am as concerned as the next person about childhood obesity and junk food.
But come on. Where are the parents? Don’t they have work to do?
Because you need to hit certain nutritional requirements before you can add toys in with food in San Francisco restaurants, Seattle shouldn’t have mandatory sick leave. It makes perfect sense. Why didn’t I see it before?
Seattle doesn’t have to copy every bad decision San Francisco concocts. Indeed, Seattle should eschew that old saw, “San Francisco is doing it, why shouldn’t we?”
I like that the first time Balter used that phrase in the column, it was paraphrasing and by the end it’s in quotes. Either she forgot that she’s the one who made it up or she’s quoting herself. And it’s an old saw even though she made it up like 15 paragraphs ago (I skipped a lot of random SF nonsense for lack of jokes, you’re welcome).
This is why I don’t read the editorial pages anymore: it’s absolute crap. If I wrote that piece for one of my high school classes* I’d probably gotten a C-, no who, what, when, where, no arguing the facts. But, she got the punctation and grammar right and turned it in on time, so it’s a C-.
I’d rather things like this were settled at the state level, most of the regulations of this nature are at the state level. But, since the state isn’t going to do it, or anything else forward looking or to make its self relevant, I guess it’s going to be up to the cities.
* And I didn’t even go to a good high school.
Tell ya what, Joni: you skip the obsessive ad hominem San Francisco-bashing, and we won’t bash the suburbs where you and almost all your Seattle Times ed board colleagues live while you tell us Seattleites what we want to do.
There’s a reason you don’t live in the city, and there’s a reason most city residents of either Seattle or S.F. wouldn’t be caught dead living in your leafy, soulless suburban enclaves. Let’s leave it at that, shall we? We’ll enjoy having sick leave at our jobs, and you can get all the strep you want from your weekly trip to Applebee’s.
“For years, San Francisco has been the punch line for goofy liberalism.”
Yes, among a small section of the ill-informed.
Now, Berkeley…. THERE’S the liberal community you want to butt your jokes against.
I remember being in the hospital and the doctor deciding I needed to have some blood drawn. The guy who came in to do it sneezed all over my arm and the syringe because he didn’t have sick leave yet.
I ended up with a bad cold and since coughing feels awesome after abdominal surgery, I don’t look to fondly back on that time.
Tis idea will actually end up increasing productivity in the long run. That f*ing jerk that always comes to work sick and gives it to everyone else might stay home.
How Joni obtained and keeps her position is indeed a demonstrable miracle of efficient allocation of economic resources brought to you by the Invisible Hand of the free market.
I’d be willing to wager a goodly sum that she has paid sick leave.
Joni Balter is a relentless idiot.
What might be most infuriating is the tone of condescension with which she marinades every conventional-wisdom utterance that she serves up. What it actually does, for me, is underscore the willful know-nothingism that serves as the wellspring for her tut-tutting criticism of people actually trying to do good things, trying to make society better for more people.
She’s adopting a reflexive posture of “Punch a Hippie” with this gratuitous San Francisco bashing – another unoriginal, unimaginative, uninsightful column from the Maureen Dowd wannabe of the West.
The core argument that it’s ‘bad for business’ is as lame as anything else in the story.
When smoking bans were first proposed, we heard the same thing – the ‘nanny state’ would drive restaurants and bars into bankruptcy by legislating customer behavior.
And now? Even in a recession, bars and restaurants are just as crowded as ever – but a bit healthier thanks to our ‘nanny state.’
A agree with the idea of mandating a minimum level of sick leave. But I think doing it on a city level is a bad idea, especially when the city is only part of a much broader metropolitan area. Businesses which aren’t location-specific can simply relocate a few miles to avoid it entirely, and the city would lose the employment base.
I think it needs to be done on a state level, at least.
@9 Really? A law whose costs are minimal – covering for sick employees a few days a year – is going to spur businesses to incur the substantial costs of relocation? Not very often.
I propose that every food service professional in Seattle cough all over anything they serve to Joni Balter – maybe then her attitude towards paid sick leave will become a bit more enlightened :-)
# 10: You have a point, that the cost isn’t that huge. It may not spur relocation. And for a lot of business, like restaurants, location is the main drawing point.
But it might make a difference in the original decision of which side of the border to locate a business. Seattle already has some taxes which a business can avoid by setting up shop a few blocks over the border, this would be just one other factor. It’s not that the businesses really want to see their employees come in sick, they just don’t want to pay for them WHILE they are sick, on vacation, etc. Which is abominable, from a moral perspective.
# 10: You have a point, that the cost isn’t that huge. It may not spur relocation. And for a lot of business, like restaurants, location is the main drawing point.
But it might make a difference in the original decision of which side of the border to locate a business. Seattle already has some taxes which a business can avoid by setting up shop a few blocks over the border, this would be just one other line item in the decision.
It’s not that the businesses really want to see their employees come in sick, they just don’t want to pay for them WHILE they are sick, on vacation, etc. Which is abominable, from a moral perspective.
Sorry for double post, it didn’t look like the first one “took”.
Free market baby! If evil liberal San Francisco and New York and Seattle are so evil, and conservative rural North Dakota, Mississippi and Alabama are the golden realms, then why doesn’t everyone live there? No one makes Fox News run out of New York city (hell, CNN is in Georgia). No one makes anyone live in San Fransisco, so why is it bigger then Des Moines Iowa…why don’t all the businesses and people move? It’s complicate, but bottom line, if it’s TOO crazy, people will leave.
How come Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon, Boeing, Alaska Airlines, CostCo, REI, Nintendo, etc are located in hippy liberal western Washington? Why didn’t Amazon move (they recently left their old HQ) to eastern Washington? It’s a paradise of conservative “values” which means their “pro-business” and Seattle hates business….so how come 99% of the businesses are IN Seattle? Huh. Free market baby.
Question?
What percentage of businesses in Seattle don’t offer sick leave?
I think Super Steve nailed it @11.
I don’t buy the “it hurts the economy argument” 100%. I am sure that any given small business will feel the pinch, and maybe some larger ones too.
That said, Joni seems to miss a bit argument for why we can and should be just like San Francisco. People want to live in San Francisco (see ridiculously high rents), the East Bay is not even a thought for many people who live in SF proper. I think Seattle has similar social capital with which it can leverage progressive policies. Sure, there is a parallel argument that this will price people out of the city, but there are ways to deal with that problem.
Point being, we’re “trendy” or “hip”, or whatever you want to call it. Seattle can make these policies and the businesses won’t leave because the people won’t leave.
The really sad part of all this is that not only is Joni as wrongheaded as her boss, but she can’t write for sour owl shit.
Old saw? Huh? She must not be from around here. It used to be “Fuck San Francisco” and “To hell with California”. Hmm, I’m not sure exactly how it was ingrained back then. Maybe subliminal shit in old local radio and TV programs. Was it JP Patches, Wunda Wunda and Captain Puget? Or maybe mothers whispered it into their baby’s ears. I don’t know. But if you were raised in Seattle, by the time you were five you hated Califoria without even knowing why. That knowledge would come later.
For my part, I got over the hate while living in Palo Alto for five years. Being just a nine iron from Pebble Beach, the Olympic Club, Pasatiempo, Half Moon Bay, Bodega Harbor – I found letting go of the hate to be quite easy.
That said, I don’t us to be like California or San Francisco, whether it’s golf, culture or governance. Slightly to considerably fucked up though we may be, we always had our own regional and urban identity and our own ways of doing things. I’d say we lost a lot of that and we’re not likely to get it back.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Seattle was a small, parochial town. If you asked somebody where they were from, you didn’t mean Seattle or New York or whatever. You were asking what high school they went attended. And when they answered, you knew about half of whatever you’d ever need to know about them.
Lesser Seattle. It used to be real. Back in the 70’s I talked three friends I met in Colorado into moving here. Man, did I ever get an ass-chewing from home-grown friends for doing that. It was like, “WTF do you think you’re doing, asking people to move here??”
I never really warmed up to Emmett Watson’s writings, but I understood where he was coming from and generally agreed. But I’d have to say that today the guy is dead in more ways than just one.
Include Stan Boreson, Slo-Mo and Brakeman Bill with those who may have instilled in a generation a hatred for all things California, especially “Frisco” (heh- that one always riles those motherfuckers). And if that’s so, what’s to be said of Bob Hale? Were his cartoons teaching us kids of more than just the coming weather? Hmm.
There are a couple of things I don’t want from employees who don’t have sick leave: Hep B, Strep, one of several varieties of pox. Not only should employees get sick leave, they should be encouraged to take it when they need to. There are plenty of employers who might offer leave but it is some sort of badge of plague-sharing for folks to work while they are sick.
Can someone please name a company that doesnt have any sick leave?
Maybe its just me, but I have never heard of or dealt with or know ANYBODY that works for a company that doesnt have sick leave.
That said, its just silly that this is something that the govt feels it needs to mandate.
This motherfucker REALLY doesn’t get out much does he?
@23 Not all of us are living off a settlement received from Rush Limbaugh for not disclosing the fact he made you 100% disabled by prolapsing your rectum beyond the point where they could shove it all back in.
There are PLENTY of businesses who do not offer sick leave, the onus isn’t on the workers’ rights crowd to prove why mandatory sick leave is necessary, EVERYONE GETS SICK AND NEEDS A FUCKING DAY OFF OF WORK, it’s on businesses to show they won’t exploit their workers without government intervention.
NEED I SHOW YOU AN EXAMPLE OF A BUSINESS EXPLOITING ITS WORKERS? REALLY?
@24
Oh, I get out plenty you loser.
Apparently, I just hang with a much better quality of people that you do.
I guess you hang out with scuzzy losers that can barely hold onto a shitty job…kinda like yourself!
how many sick days to loser, wannabe musicians get?
@23
WTF are you rambling on about?
If someone works for a company that doesnt offer sick leave, then they should look elsewhere for a better employer that suits their needs. Seem simple enough.
and if your such a piece of crap that you are cornered into having to work a crappy employer, then perhaps you should reflect back upon your life and all the bad choices you made.
Just a thought.
@23 Almost any job that pays hourly wages, for starters.
O.K. I admit that I am against this. I also do not get sick leave. I want to make that point clear. I do have a question on how this will work. I work in Seattle. I do security. My Company is located in Sea-Tac. It is not a Seattle based corporation. We have accounts is Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and in many other cities. How will this affect me if it becomes law. Will I get a benefit that other employees of my company will not get, or will this only affect businesses based in Seattle? I am not trying to cause problems I just want to know.
@27 So there aren’t bad business practices, the problem is the bad people businesses are forced to hire who don’t deserve benefits or a living wage because they’re such “piece[s] of crap”, like the kind of piece of crap who goes on a blog and displays his ignorance for the whole fucking world to see, thank you for infecting us all with your astute assessment.
@28
really, I knew plenty of people that work for an hourly wage that have vacation and sick leave.
try agian.
@29
Fair enough Matt – I am surprised you dont get sick leave.
@32 If I’m a right-wing troll with a 2nd grade education who gets paid by a PR firm to be a sock-puppet, should I get sick leave?
I am hiring my first employee. it’s shocking how hard it is to learn all the withholdings and taxes. this position is part time, about $1300 per month, and the paychex company wants about $900 just to do the paychecks nad pay all the various governments. that’d be a shocking 8% of the total payroll. Try to learn it all myself, it’s like 15 hours.
why can’t one of these governments simply set up an app where I make a payment, the government takes the taxes and sends them to the other governments and pays the employee? why does the government be content with waiting three months for the interim payment to be made? it’s like ll these rules were written back 30 years ago and now we have EFT and apps and internet and nothing gets updated. I litereally have to set up a special bank account to deposit FICa contributions, then hold the money for three months then pay? why don’t they make it easy?
@30
Go eat a dick Chaz Bono.
take your monkey ass, start up a business, hire some people, and you can give all the sick leave you want.
f-ing nanny state pussy.
maybe we can have a law that requires your limp wristed hand to be held every time you take a crap too, just to make sure you dont strain anything.
that said, I will take back my generalization/comment regarding people w/o sick leave.
Still, there is no justification that requires it to be a law. Whats next? do we need a law that requires businesses to give everyone 3 weeks vacation a year too?
Fuck, why dont we just mandate that everbody get a job that pays $75,000 a year with full benefits – would that make all the nanny-state socialits happy?
@33
no, because you would suck at it.
LMFAO @ paid by a PR firm.
Thats some funny chit.
Do black helicopters fly over your house at night too?
@26…
…no asshole, you’re stupid and out of touch with the real world and real people.
You wouldn’t believe all the dorimonson/lushflimbaugh crap you spew if you knew anything about anything.
@38
well apparently I know enough to be successful and not require handouts from the govt….unlike a whole lot of out of work wannabe musicians..
when is your benefit concert? lol.
@37 I stand corrected. No one in their right mind would pay you to do anything but sit in a corner and finger paint with your own feces.
Not only should Seattle mandate sick leave, the City/County of SF also covers gender reassignment surgery. It looks like the Mayor wants Seattle to follow suit.
I can’t wait ’til it happens!
@40
oh great, then we get to pay for your sex change operation too.
sick freaks should be locked up in a rubber room instead of having their nads cut off – at our expense.
and seattle can be even more of a laughing stock like SF is….sex change operations, for chists sake – these people need to be treated like the mental defects that they are, not normalized.
LMFAO @ “gender reassignment”..nice PC way to say “hey, im a sick freak with a shit load of mental issues”.
@41 Aaaaand there we are!
You don’t even care about making any kind of real argument about anything, let alone being against mandated sick leave. That’s why I gave you an out.
Go ahead! Just admit someone is paying you or otherwise putting you up to this.
There’s no way you could be this backwards, illiterate and vociferous all at the same time. If you ARE sitting at home diarrhea-ing all over the internet of your own volition, then you have nothing but my unmitigated pity.
Black helicopters indeed.
LMFAO…
Sorry to burst your bubble Chaz Bono, but you think youre smarter than you really are. its ok dude(ette), that condition is typical amongst your type.
@39…
…the Republican party is populated with assholes like you who just don’t care who and what they fuck over to “get successful and have a lot of money”.
In the human race, the race to be human…I can’t imagine a bigger loser than a jerk like you.
@42…
…this guy is the kind of shitheel that could be a paid troll.
HA really gets the paid trolls around election time. They scatter like cockroach when it’s over.
Awwww poor Rujaxoff….did I hurt your little feelings? Maybe you can play a sad song to yourself…its gonna have to be to yourself because I dont think anyone else wants to listen to your muzak…
Perhaps its assholes like you who ride everyone elses coat tails and leech off the hard workers of society who are the real losers…ya thinks?
or perhaps rather than playing a sad song, you can do one of your “nights of fun” and vandalize a few churches to take your self-pity out.
@45
is it election time?
@45 It’s a complex now. PR firms hosting fake accounts for everything and paying people like this guy to spread nonsense. The Willamette Week just did an article about how much govt entities in Portland pay for PR. The Bahraini govt is giving millions to a US PR firm to whitewash and counteract any dissent, they already ‘disappeared’ one blogger and are working at discrediting more journalists/activists, all with through the help of US corporations.
Something benign like mandating sick leave gets turned into COMMUNISM, OUTRAGE, but the fact this guy can’t even spell let alone make any real point whatsoever kind of gives it away he’s nothing but an angry, lonely troll who gets his kicks hating on people, I should’ve seen that let alone facilitate his idiocy.
“Tonton, play me a sad song”……
re 49: I know who you really are. You’re Norton Buffalo’s slow-witted cousin.
Get back in your room and practice — or you’ll never be good enough to be a Harmonicat.
I get paid hourly. I get sick leave. Well technically I just get “leave” as those of us who never used the sick portion of our leave got sick of having a benefit we had to lie to use. So now we have leave.
A quick search of low wage employers shows that many of them have sick leave, but I wonder how many of their workers can actually take a day off w/o catching hell?
Just ’cause Joni and the trolls don’t use facts doesn’t mean we don’t have too.
Apparently WRB never has a meal in a restaurant.
Also there must be some Google link that trolls use to find this place, or WRB is just one of the usual troll enraptured into a different electronic body.
@52
I particularly like El Gaucho…
..and it looks like they are going to re-open the cigar room there – that is great news!
Ruth’s Chris is also tops….
Bartertown runs a three-mile island sweatshop the pours oil down the sewer and into the water table.
Nice going asshole. Don’t sign up for Medicare when you get throat cancer. Thanks.
@45…
Have another six-pack and go back to sleep.
Thanks for the post Carl.
I went back to the paper after I read your post and even though the puppy had shat all over Joni’s column it turns out she’d done no damage to the content of Joni’s ‘work’ nor changed the odor of it.
scat is scat is scat.
@15. What do you expect – right on and well said.
@56: Why feed the trolls?
What @ # 34 said:
“why can’t one of these governments simply set up an app where I make a payment, the government takes the taxes and sends them to the other governments and pays the employee?”
Actually, that’s a very good idea. Most companies use some form of business payroll system, even if it’s just quickbooks. Lots of them use ADP as a private payroll/tax processor, but for small businesses that’s expensive. I think that’s something we can work on – if government can reduce the cost of payroll processing and tax payments, and reduce delays in receiving tax payments, everyone benefits.
I should point out that I used to share office space with an accounting firm that handled payroll for small employers. The biggest problem they had was that they required the employer to deposit the payroll (along with associated taxes) several days before the actual payroll date. Despite this, some employers bounced their payroll checks to the accounting office. For some employers on the verge of going out of business, this was a huge risk to the accounting office – this small office with four employees might get stuck with a two-week payroll (and taxes) for a company with 20+ employees. I remember one guy who was about to go under bounced a check to them, and when the employees were looking for their paychecks, he blamed a screw-up at the accounting office. They were suddenly hit with about a dozen very mad construction workers who wanted their paychecks, and they wanted them NOW.
The IRS is very agressive at collectin 941 taxes (taxes for withholding, soc. security, and medicare). One reason is that they have to issue refunds of tax withholding to employees even if their employer didn’t pay. So the IRS comes down hard on employers who are even a few days late on their 941 deposits, they try to keep a small problem from becoming a big problem over time.
Funny, all we had to do is talk about payroll, employee benefits, and tax deposits, and the ad for Intuit online payroll system pops up at the top of the page.
Ruth Chris is overpriced and the steak isn’t that spectacular. And everything is extra – even if you want a potato with your steak, mushrooms, or some vegitables, you have to pay a handsome price for a plate which MIGHT be enough for two.
Daniel’s Broiler is a better choice.
The Seattle Health Department should set up a hotline that restaurant workers could call if their employer makes them come to work sick and issue fines to restaurants that do.
Not sure if they still do it but, the Kitsap C. Health Department used to publish the name of every restaurant they inspected in a given month and how that restaurant faired in its inspection.
@54 wrb
@61 rhp6033,
Ruth Chris is where a fool and his money are soon parted. The freakin Sizzler serves better steak!
But wrb listens to Limpdong and Handjob so since they proclaim Ruth Chris “Best Steak House Chain” he gladly overpays and echoes the paid promotions. sap!
RoRo in Fremont (I wish they’d kept the name The Rowdy Cowgirl) has a mighty good BBQ brisket.
LOL… Every thing on the menu at that place rocks and the prices are reasonable.
Sometimes I dress up and pretend to be a stock broker so they’ll serve me at The Metropolitan.
We have government, its monopoly on force, and laws that coddle, enhance, and protect entrepreneurs. But when we do the same for workers, we are ‘crazy liberals’.
My fondest wish is that the Times outsource Joni’s job to a call center in Bangladesh.
He pooh poohs those guys but has happily admitted to listening to Dori Monson. Almost every piece of angry bigot crap he brings here is covered by Monson.
@66
and yet I still listen to Dave Ross as well…
That said, I maybe get in 2 hours a week of talk radio….you on the otherhand, will get that much of AM 1090(barf) before breakfast…
…gee, who is a brainwashed lemming?
your still a jealous loser(like your butt buddy wannabe failed musician rujaxoff)….you want what you cant get: success and self pride.
Don’t turn Seattle into another San Francisco.
Seattle is more Liberal. I would like their World Series and Super Bowl titles, though.
Its like you read my mind! You seem to know a lot about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with a few pics to drive the message home a bit, but instead of that, this is magnificent blog. A great read. I’ll certainly be back.