Puzder laughs about the liberal theory that businesses are not investing because they want to “punish Obama.” Rising health-care costs are, he says, just one uncertainty inhibiting expansion. Others are government policies raising fuel costs, which infect everything from air conditioning to the cost (including deliveries) of supplies, and the threat that the National Labor Relations Board will use regulations to impose something like “card check” in place of secret-ballot unionization elections.
CKE has about 720 California restaurants, in which 84 percent of the managers are minorities and 67 percent are women. CKE has, however, all but stopped building restaurants in this state because approvals and permits for establishing them can take up to two years, compared to as little as six weeks in Texas, and the cost to build one is $100,000 more than in Texas, where CKE is planning to open 300 new restaurants this decade.
CKE restaurants have 95 percent employee turnover in a year — not bad in this industry — and the health-care benefits under CKE’s current “mini-med” plans are capped in a way that makes them illegal under Obamacare. So CKE will have to convert many full-time employees to part-timers to limit the growth of its burdens under Obamacare.
In an economic climate of increasing uncertainties, Puzder says, one certainty is that many businesses now marginally profitable will disappear when Obamacare causes that margin to disappear. A second certainty is that “employers everywhere will be looking to reduce labor content in their business models as Obamacare makes employees unambiguously more expensive.”
I'm thinking if your business model has 95% turnover in 12 months baked into an industry where the average employee doesn't earn a living wage and are basically subject to indentured servitude, the problem isn't "government regulations" at all. Will dismisses that little fact, however. Think about that. If you get a job at a Hardee's, there's only a 5% chance you will still work for the company a year later.
What kind of business model is that where that exists, where 95% of your employees are gone after a year? Furthermore, what kind of person believe that to be a good thing? George Will, apparently. He's had his job for quite some time, from what I understand.
A bit too long, if you ask me. The larger problem of course is that Will wants to draft every unemployed and underemployed American into the "war on job-killing regulations" when the reality as to why our economy is shot is that the people at the top designed it to churn through people at an alarming rate. Without the stability of a dependable job at a iving wage, no wonder we're falling apart.
If you wonder where the American middle class went to, they got shoved into the economic fast food meat grinder. If only we could make these employees actual indentured servants, America's middle class would be so much more vibrant!
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