PortAventura workers will strike during Easter weekend

Huh. We got censored for supporting solidarity.

Well,,,, No, I was just Jeffed.

Lets say you own a business that employs 100 people. To keep things simple with round numbers, your annual sales are $100 million with $10 million in annual net income (after taxes). You comply with all labor laws (including minimum wage laws). You have a number of people making minimum wage. You are happy with the number and quality of employees that you have. Should you be obligated to pay your employees more because you can afford to do so? Your income is about top 0.1% (definitely comfortably in the top 1%). So, you could afford to pay people more. Should it be required? If so, should you be obligated to pay more for raw materials, utilities, insurance, etc. because you can afford to pay more for those as well. Paying more would allow those businesses to pay their employees more.

Put aside for a moment the concept that paying people more can attract better quality of workers, result in less turnover, etc. Those are often advanced to support increasing minimum wages. Typically by people who have never run a business, hired/fired anyone, set a budget for a business, etc. But they are pretty basic in terms of economics and something that most business owners/managers understand. Cost/benefit analysis involved.

GoBucks89:

Should you be obligated to pay your employees more because you can afford to do so?

Do your employees make enough to support their livelihood? Shelter, Food, and the various items society has deemed a requirement for existence? If not then yes.

TheMillenniumRider:

Huh. We got censored for supporting solidarity.

WTF are you talking about?

Do your employees make enough to support their livelihood?

Why should they be expected for part-time, seasonal work?

When I worked at Walmart, I changed the slogan to "Our employees live in poverty so you can save money and live better."

After I left Walmart, friends who still work there told me that pay has been getting better. (In their defense.) I have a friend who work overnight stocking shelves who makes $27 an hour. That's not bad.

Here in the U.S., if a business can't or won't pay enough money that their employees enough to make a good living, they do not have a viable business. Low wages create employees that are eligible for SNAP and Medicaid, paid for by other taxpayers. They cause their employees stress, which causes poor health.

Whats more important to the betterment of society? Pay your employees enough that they don't have to worry about living, or buying another private jet or mansion? Kind of makes me sick.

Jeff:

WTF are you talking about?

Earlier posts in this thread disappeared, not really sure what happened, just giving you a hard time. ;)

Jeff:
Why should they be expected for part-time, seasonal work?

PortAventura is basically a year round operation. But my first post was in reply to the hypothetical, which didn’t stipulate any special conditions.

GoBucks89:

Lets say you own a business that employs 100 people [etc].

I don't really see what your comment has to do with this situation. The workers want more pay. The company doesn't want to pay more. So the workers are withholding their labor. Nobody is obligating anybody to do anything, any more than if a steel company wants to charge more, and the company doesn't want to pay more, the steel company can withhold its steel.

It may be true that Spain has laws protecting the workers' ability to strike, making it hard to hire replacement workers, etc. IANA expert in European labor law. I guess you could say they are "obligated" to pay more, but to me this is a societal choice that was made, and the company chose to go into business in Spain. It could have opened its amusement park in a country with a lower minimum wage, like Bangladesh.

I think there was another thread in the general forum that disappeared when the news item was posted.

Do your employees make enough to support their livelihood? Shelter, Food, and the various items society has deemed a requirement for existence?

What's enough to support livelihood depends on circumstances, right? Single person with no kids has a less expensive livelihood than a single parent of 3 kids. If minimum wage needs to be enough to support employees' livelihoods, will it vary by those different circumstances? Single person with no kids gets paid less than single parent of 3? Or does everyone get paid at the single parent/3 kid level?

Here in the U.S., if a business can't or won't pay enough money that their employees enough to make a good living, they do not have a viable business.

Sounds like a recipe for chasing jobs out of the US.

Whats more important to the betterment of society? Pay your employees enough that they don't have to worry about living, or buying another private jet or mansion?

So all business owners own a private jet and mansion? Interesting.

I don't really see what your comment has to do with this situation.

If I didn't know better, I would think you are new here. Many threads here go off on tangents. Often times with little connection to the original topic. What does my comment have to do with the situation at PortAventura? Not much. Just another tangent. In part though it resulted from MillenniumRider's post in the thread that was deleted. My hypothetical was meant to explore views people have about minimum wages.

More generally, many of the news items on this thread generate little (if anything) in the way of a discussion. And even those that do generate a discussion aren't very interesting (at least not to me). Some of the tangents generate more discussion (and are often more interesting (again to me)) than the original topic. Limit tangents and posting on this site slows even further and it becomes a much less interesting place to visit.

GoBucks89:

Some of the tangents generate more discussion (and are often more interesting (again to me)) than the original topic.

The CoasterBuzz Drift at work!

I've been to PortAventura World and its a very lovely park. I would want the employees to be happy because its a beautiful park

TheMillenniumRider:

Earlier posts in this thread disappeared

It's not magic, I deleted them because we don't need two topics on the same thing

Curious - is deleting the topic the norm or is closing/locking the topic once the official news discussion post is created the norm?

I have seen the latter. Maybe I have not seen the 1st way if the topic is deleted before I see it.

If they really do strike and it continues into Easter weekend they might just be successful in killing attendance.

Should come back to life after a few days, though.

Jeff:

It's not magic,

It kind of is, they were there one minute, then gone the next, no notification, no alert, they just vanished like a fart in the breeze. The perfect disappearing act. From the user perspective at least, the magician, or webmaster in this case, knew what was happening the entire time.

One of the things to remember here is that Port Aventura is in Europe, not the US. As should somewhat be obvious, there are massively different structures for taxing people and massively different views on the role of government (medical coverage being one aspect). Depending on the country, there are a minimum number of required vacation days (20-25 for most of the EU). All of those things make the concept of a strike for better wages slightly different than if the same thing happened in the US.

I remember posting a snarky response to a bot or spammer that started a spam topic. Jeff deleted the whole thread, my post along with it.

Single most soul crushing moment of my life, I still haven't forgiven him.

So, the theory, is the Jeff has a stressful day or gets frustrated by someone, then says you know what will cheer me up? I’ll go delete someone’s post like a ninja behind the scenes. Then laughs maniacally.

Walt S:

All of those things make the concept of a strike for better wages slightly different than if the same thing happened in the US.

Different, in your eyes, that they should be less likely to strike because they have it better?

The only reason that they have such better conditions is because they fight back against poor working conditions. Here’s the thing, the major common goal should be to make everything easier across the board for society and people. We have become more productive than ever, yet there are a select few who hoard away the benefits of that productivity. We are, checks, the richest country in the world. Yet our working conditions are ****, we have no guaranteed healthcare, we have little to no social safety nets. That is a problem.

With the operations as crappy as they are there, how would you notice if the workers were on strike?