I'm posting this here, because I know that in the future I'll want to refer to it, and this makes it easy for me to find. At Marianas Eye Institute we pay our employees well enough that it will be a few years before the increase affects even our lowest paid employees. And they will have gotten raises by then anyway. The increase doesn't affect me directly, but I expect a gradual contraction of island businesses. At least the wait is over. Wall Street, and Main Street, hate uncertainty.
1 comment:
I'm on the side that's cheering this raise, although I think it's not the best scheme we could have. I am not at all surprised that fair-minded business owners like you won't be immediately effected.
I realize that marginal businesses will be the ones that are hurt, but I think those marginal businesses do not contribute enough to our overall economic health to warrant delaying or denying the wage increase our employees obviously need and deserve.
And I'm naive enough to hope that the jobs lost by the contraction in businessess will be those of our alien workers, so that our local population can find work, be employed, and spend their money locally.
I hope that we will have fewer alien workers because we can't continue to import the over-large numbers we've had in the past, and that we still allow to enter every year. Our islands aren't large enough to take in the teeming masses of Asia. But I'm also hoping that those alien workers we do have will be treated more fairly, and given the opportunity to become immigrants, with more permanence and on-track for US citizenship, if they want.
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