Greenlight Bookstore Responds to Paid Vacation Legislation

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From the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association:

Dear New York City Council Members Laurie Cumbo and Matthieu Eugene,

Mayor de Blasio made an unexpected and dramatic statement last week with the announcement that he is seeking paid time off for all private sector employees.  The decision about whether and how to implement this proposal will be up to you, and we encourage you to think clearly and broadly about the issues at stake and how this may affect the districts you represent.

New York is a progressive city, and as small business owners we are proud to be a part of that.  Our independent bookstore has thrived for ten years as a space for ideas and conversations, often about social justice issues.  We also work hard to give our employees a fair and inclusive workplace and a good quality of life.  Like many local businesses, we are in favor of government, both local and national, thinking more about the quality of life of its working class citizens, rather than of its richest donors.

But New York cannot solve the massive issue of worker fairness by simply dropping it in the lap of its local business owners.

These are the same New Yorkers who have been squeezed by astronomical commercial rents, slim margins, and rising operating costs, leaving entire neighborhoods full of empty storefronts.

These are the New Yorkers who have recently had to absorb a rapidly escalating minimum wage, with little time to adjust to the costs that need to be balanced in order to manage this.

These are the New Yorkers who have watched as de Blasio and Cuomo offered $1.5 billion in incentives to Amazon in order to bring their new headquarters to Queens.

. . . .

No community groups were consulted in advance on this action – just as no one was consulted on the announcement regarding paid vacations.

Local businesses have been asked to give more and more: paid sick leave, quickly escalated minimum wage, and now potentially paid vacation. At the same time, Amazon is being offered massive financial incentives before hiring a single local worker or adding a penny to New York’s infrastructure.

Don’t get us wrong: we think all New Yorkers – indeed, all humans – deserve fair pay, benefits, and a good quality of life. But in the interest of worker fairness, de Blasio seems not to have considered fairness to local businesses, including the small business that employ over half of private sector employees in the city.

There is no support offered in exchange for these financial asks – it appears that our progressive city has not even studied any possible solutions for local businesses who may be struggling with these new realities. Faced with these increasing costs, many local businesses will simply close, or move elsewhere.

We and our fellow small business owners want to support this move in favor of worker fairness. But we can’t do it on our own; the city has to help.

. . . .

Therefore, we are asking the City Council to consider the following actions as it addresses paid vacation legislation:

  • Exempt businesses under 50 employees – those who are most likely to be operating with razor-thin profit margins.
  • Increase tax credits for small businesses– to help to shoulder the burden of increasing costs.

Link to the rest at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association

PG is reminded of a quote about tax legislation from Senator Russell B. Long, from Louisiana, who served seven years as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which handles tax legislation.

Most people have the same philosophy about taxes.

Don’t tax you,
Don’t tax me,
Tax that fellow behind the tree.

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43 thoughts on “Greenlight Bookstore Responds to Paid Vacation Legislation”

  1. This problem is common all over the world. The costs of employing someone in Australia are absolutely ridiculous. There is a minimum wage of $A17.70 at the moment, though virtually all employees are covered by Regulatory Awards and receive far more. Added to this is 4 weeks annual leave per year. For these 4 weeks normal pay is increased by 17.5% leave loading. Added to this is superannuation, currently 9.5% of gross wages, soon to rise to 10%. Long service leave is available which basically gives a qualifying employee 2 months leave at full pay after working 10 years, pro-rata if they leave after 5 years. If you want to employ someone on a casual basis you get the pleasure of paying an hourly rate plus 25% in lieu of leave. There is currently a big campaign by Unions here to force employers to employ people full or part time rather than casual, despite the fact that many casual employees prefer the money up-front. Generous sick leave, maternity leave and all sorts of personal leave are available. Even small businesses are subject to unfair dismissal laws which make getting rid of underperforming employees a nightmare likely to land you before an Industrial Relations Tribunal with its “members” including many former Union officials, and cost an employer up to 6 months wages.

    What this regime tends to do of course is to inflate prices and make businesses think very carefully about whether to employ. A “Labor” Federal Government will almost certainly be elected next year which derives a great deal of funding from powerful unions to which it is beholden. The likely next Prime Minister is a former leader of one of the most militant of them.

    Australia has I think gone too far in one direction. I suspect the US may currently be too far towards the other extreme. The damage in Australia is somewhat mitigated by the fact that more people with more money in their pockets do spend it which provides some stimulation to the economy. But such conditions come at a price. If book stores have not been paying employees for holidays and are now called on to do so logically their prices must go up. But of course in Australia the Federal Government mandates this throughout the whole country. In New York such bookstores may well be unable to compete with bookshops in neighbouring areas or of course order from Amazon, in which case the store will ultimately go out of business, with their employees joining the unemployment queues.

    Basically there are no free rides. Better conditions for employees and higher government benefits come at the cost of rising prices and taxes. On the other extreme, terrible employment conditions results in all sorts of social problems. Friends who come back from the US often remark on the stark differences where in walking a couple of blocks theu go from affluence to Ghetto. And on the number of older people who must work.

    • What all those “protections” and taxes do is reduce the purchasing power of the currency at the grassroots level, in effect devaluing the currency through the back door.

      It’s all about vote buying.

      In the US, because government power is distributed across national, state, and county/local levels, conditions can be fine tuned to local needs.

      Just one simple example: there are places in “flyover country” where a nice two bedroom apartment rents for US$400 a month, whereas in places like SiliValley or Manhattan, a walk-in closet rents for US$2000-3000.

      With that kind of variability trying to mandate national standards as if the country were a small city-state is totally foolish. So don’t assume the US is under-taxed or under-regulated. The borders between states aren’t just lines on a map, they represented real differences in economics, culture, and politics. Oftentimes there are major differences within a single state: upper Michigan vs the rest of the state, Northern California vs Southern California vs the eastern half of the state; NYC vs the rest of the state, Atlanta vs the rest of Georgia, northern Florida vs central Florida vs Miami.

      Worth remembering: over twenty of the fifty states are individually larger than the UK. Several are larger than Germany and France.

      Big place, big variability.
      The problems of one state aren’t the problems of the next and trying to force the “solutions” of one across the entire union will be resisted.

      • This collection of 50 states was originally meant to mean 50 little laboratories. Want high taxes/high benefits? Move to CA. Want low taxes/low benefits? Move to another state, lets say IN.

        Have skills? Move to states that feature high paying jobs in your industry. Have none? Live where you can do menial work and pay $400 a month in rent.

        The idea that books must cost more to someone paying $400 a month in rent so that the employees of said bookstore can get a bunch of free goodies sounds rotten to me and many others. I suppose that’s what makes us American.

        • To an extent, the system still works as designed: the experiments are ongoing and delivering meaningful data about what works and what doesn’t.

          What isn’t working is the insistence of some people that what doesn’t actually work on a regional basis would somehow work on a national basis, even in places where it isn’t wanted. Ideology trying to override reality.

    • In the full article he says “Progressive” five times. Seems he wants someone else to pay for the progressive policies.

    • No sympathy, but they leave New York and come to other states, states which used to have decent tax policies. And then they change them because of the ex-New Yorkers.

      Virginia was a red state when I moved here 16 years ago. It is about to turn blue.

      • Out west they have the same problem with Californian expatriates. Specifically Nevada and Colorado.
        They leave because they’re finding California unliveable but don’t associate the unacceptable conditions with the policies that created them.

        • Just read an article where three judges in the state virtually guaranteed a Democratic lock on the VA legislature. Which, until the redistricting theft, was Republican. As long as I’ve lived here, I think.

          I’ll be looking to change states when I retire if this trend continues, because I won’t be able to afford retirement here.

  3. I have my doubts about this bit:

    Exempt businesses under 50 employees – those who are most likely to be operating with razor-thin profit margins.

    Perhaps this would help in the way it’s intended to, but it seems to me that the most likely effect is that it would make sure a business with 49 employees never hired anyone else. In general these sorts of restrictions benefit the big boys by ensuring that no upstarts can ever get big enough to challenge them.

    • Law of unintended consequences.

      The fly in the ointment for all these high minded mandates is they expect the targets to meekly take it and sacrifice their own interests just because they’re told to.

      The reality is folks find ways to adjust and minimize the impact. The most common reactions are to reduce staff size, staff hours, or just move out.

      https://nypost.com/2018/12/21/new-york-state-leads-the-country-in-population-decline-census/

      Between July 2017 and July 2018, 180,000 people moved out of NY.

      (For contrast, 125,000 moved out of Puerto Rico during the same period, mostly because of a class 5 hurricane.)

      • A great example of this is the Washington DC cigarette tax. Officials calculated how much more tax revenue the tax would generate if it was doubled. They took the previous year’s tax revenue, multiplied by two, and found a great new source of revenue to fund city services.

        Did tax revenue rise? No. It fell. They received less tax revenue.

        Planners were puzzled. Total cigarette sales in DC fell. Some said this is because the tax encouraged people to quit smoking, and that was a great social good.

        Less idealistic folks observed that cigarette sales in the surrounding counties rose. Consumers commuting from the surrounding counties stopped buying the more expensive cigarettes in DC, and instead bought them in their home counties.

        This happens over and over. People think they can make one change, and nothing else will change. Last I read, in Seattle, total wages paid at the new minimum wage were less than total wages paid at the previous minimum wage. That means fewer jobs. Lost jobs. Unemployed people who once had jobs.

        Activists tell us this doesn’t happen. Consumers don’t care what the activists think. Employers don’t care what the activists think. Consumers and employers act in their own best interests and change behavior. They don’t cooperate.

        • “That means fewer jobs. Lost jobs. Unemployed people who once had jobs. ”

          You say that like it’s a bad thing.

          Fewer private jobs increases demand for government services which helps reelection of the IdiotPoliticians™ who built their careers on boosting government services. The more people depend on government largesse the more powerful the dispensers of largesse become.

          “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

          • Results don’t matter as long as we are doing the right thing and are on the right side of history. Things that have failed over and over in the past will work this time because we are so much smarter.

          • ‘Our Liberal government gets a lot of support from people on low incomes. The more people they can keep on low incomes, the more support they get.’

            —Al Waxman, King of Kensington

      • That movement out of high taxes states will really hurt the red states that depend on the blue states money to subsidize themselves.

  4. “Exempt businesses under 50 employees – those who are most likely to be operating with razor-thin profit margins.”

    Actually ‘razor-thin profit margins’ are why Amazon is eating everybody else’s lunch. But of course the OP has ADS and had to throw ‘Amazon’ in there as a bad thing.

    “Increase tax credits for small businesses– to help to shoulder the burden of increasing costs.”

    But small businesses don’t hire enough warm bodies for it to balance out, on the other hand they’ll hand out plenty of tax credits to bring in big companies – like Amazon.

    Hmm, I think it’s time for the OP to pull up stakes and head for a place friendlier to small business, NYC is no longer their kind of town.

    • If America isn’t careful, it might end up like those countries whose citizens keep trying to get in here.

      • A decent minimum wage, leave entitlement, healthcare, etc, are standard in many countries, with no detriment. Australia has all these and was the only developed nation to pass through the GFC relatively unscathed.

        • A we watch the EU slowly crumble, we might examine detriments. North vs south vs east?

          Also standard in many countries that have enacted such enabling legislation is an inability to deliver. Venezuela? Six month MRI waits in developed countries?

          Legislation doesn’t produce anything, and if the economy doesn’t deliver, it doesn’t matter what the law says.

          Rationing is the inevitable result. This is because demand soars when marginal price is zero. But, with no corresponding increase in supply, we encounter a shortage. The shortage s controlled with rationing.

          On the supply side, rising costs for employers reduces demand for labor. See Seattle. All is driven by consumer demand curves, which are not subject to any legislation.

          And here come the robots…

        • Australia has a smaller population than the NYC metro area and almost two thirds of it is concentrated in five metro areas around the east coast. A lot easier to homogenize culture and politics than across a population base of 330M with 55 metro areas north of a Million.

          “Quantity is a quality all its own.”

          Folks don’t really understand the size of the US, much less the scope of its problems.

          • Yes. Every time someone talks about how we should have mass transit instead of our own cars, I give one of Sheldon Cooper’s snorts of derision.

            When gas was $4.50 a gallon, I looked into ways to use mass transit to go from Richmond, VA, to Alexandria, a suburb of DC. I telecommuted four days a week but that 200-mile round trip was expensive. If I took the train, I would have to leave work at 3 p.m. and pay more for the train than I did in gas. If I took the bus, I’d have to double my commute time and pay more for the bus than I did in gas.

            The thing that people don’t factor into the mass transit equation is that you need to have the mass transiting to the same place at the same time. There are many people who commute between Richmond, Fredericksburg, and the DC area. But not enough to make travel cheap and fast–except when using your own car.

      • It has been postulated and dramatized repeatedly.
        (DARK ANGEL comes easiest to mind.)

        Only problem is: where could American boat people go after the economy collapses?

  7. It amuses me that many of the small business owners who may suffer from the policies probably voted De Blasio into office originally. Careful what you wish for.

    • This guy makes a pretty good case until he says those other small businesses should pay, but not me.

      • Have you ever noticed that if you explain how hypocritical it is to not want to pay for the liberal things they vote for, the liberals suddenly go deaf?

  8. In the UK, workers are entitled to 28 days’ paid holiday/vacation per year (which can include bank holidays), and also sick pay at a minimum rate (although many employers pay the latter at an employee’s daily rate for a certain amount of time). Somehow, small businesses – including bookshops – continue to operate.

    Surely one of the richest countries in the world can figure out how to make that happen too?

    • Jane Friedman 2012 (via Jonny Geller tweet): ‘Stark reality of modern bookselling in UK -Bookshop numbers halved in seven years.’

    • Maybe if we weren’t on a race/spiral to the bottom where customers won’t pay more than the have to – and neither will employers.

      And if we could, then healthcare shouldn’t be the mess in the US it is either.

      For small shops this is like another raise in minimum wage and knowing their sales will go down if they try increasing their prices to make up for it (which they can’t do because then their shoppers will simple shop out of town and/or use the internet …)

      • exactly. we pay 35% income taxes after about $398,000 in income and I believe the UK’s 40% tax rate kicks in at less than $50k US. no thank you. enjoy your paid time off and your ‘free’ healthcare.

    • One of the big problems in EU countries is that hiring an employee is one step away from marrying them. If business slows down and you no longer have work for them, you’re still stuck with those costs. So businesses turn down work that might generate more jobs because of the risk of taking on new employees.

      • One of the big problems in EU countries is that hiring an employee is one step away from marrying them.

        Don’t be silly.

        Every EU country allows no-fault divorce. Just try finding one that allows no-fault sacking of employees.

        It’s much easier to get rid of an unwanted spouse than an unwanted employee.

        • Can’t speak for the rest of the EU, but – just in case anyone was thinking of putting it in a book – no, there is no ‘no fault’ divorce in the UK. (Somebody did write a novel about the ridiculousness of the system in the 1930s, I think.)

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