Across the Great Divide

How Emmer's Jobs Agenda Matches MN Forward's.

If Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel wants to give personal campaign donations to the likes of GOP candidate for Governor Tom Emmer and Tea Party Candidate for Bombthrower Michele Bachmann, that's his right. If Target and other Minnesota corporations want to give money out of the corporate coffers to benefit such candidates, that's also now their right.

But as a shareholder, I'm interested in hearing how the supported front groups like MN Forward will advance Target's (and other Minnesota corporation) business interests. Steinhafel's response has focused so far on Emmer's social policy views, which he implies are at odds with Target's values.

As you know, Target has a history of supporting organizations and candidates, on both sides of the aisle, who seek to advance policies aligned with our business objectives, such as job creation and economic growth.

Steinhafel says "We rarely endorse all advocated positions of the organizations or candidates we support," which is fair, but he also disclaims a political or social agenda — leaving open the question of what the agenda is that gets $150,000 in corporate cash and in-kind contributions.

Since the CEO is silent on that, I checked MN Forward to see what it says about its agenda. Basically, its entire website is a donation page, without any detail about specific policies it stands for:

MN Forward is a new organization established to ensure that private-sector job creation and economic growth are at the top of the agenda during the 2010 campaign. We are working with a broad coalition of Minnesota job creators to elect candidates from both parties who support policies that enhance job growth in Minnesota.

Okay, no there there.

Let's look at the jobs agenda of Tom Emmer, the candidate so far benefiting from MN Forward's advocacy. He waxes about the good old days when Honeywell and other large companies were the state's big employers. Back in 2008, when Marty Seifert was shopping this story around, I explained why this was not such a scary development. It's still the case.

And Emmer trots out this claim, also debunked in 2008 and updated last month.

Today, an expansive and expensive state government has crippled our business environments and lost our greatest resource – our people. The state’s largest employers are now the State of Minnesota, our public university systems, and the federal government.

Higher taxes and more government spending do not lead to a better economic climate. Proposals to raise taxes and fees or eliminate tax incentives for businesses are not restoring our competitive advantage for business development. A reputation as the highest taxed state in the nation will not encourage economic growth but only drive it away.

Our state’s future relies on a blueprint for economic development built on private initiative and the entrepreneurial spirit. Strengthening our economy through business retention, relocation, and development in the private sector must be our priority. We must help create jobs by supporting tax incentives, streamlining permitting, and reducing mandates.

State government has "lost our people" and "proposals" have not fixed a bad national economy. The blueprint for creating jobs involves tax incentives for business and relaxing oversight and mandates (such as minimum wage regulations?).

Hardly the kind of business case that would earn internal funding from a Target CEO, so maybe there's more meat somewhere. [UPDATE: A Bluestem Prairie has some. ] Instead, all we have to go by are Emmer's more clearly articulated positions.

But that's asking for a lot from a candidate who misses the fact that the same Minnesota business climate he decries supported the phenomenal growth of his two biggest back-door funders — Target and Best Buy.

GOP The Party of Business — Really?

I think I know why the Minnesota GOP is so hard on the minimum wage. Its business brains need all the help they can get just to break even.

Mitch Berg, Luke Hellier and the MNGOP itself seem to think State Auditor Rebecca Otto is, to quote Mitch, "Like A Junkie With A Stolen Platinum Card."

As I have pointed out elsewhere, Otto saved the state far more money by eliminating the featherbed position occupied by former deputy auditor Tony Sutton (now MNGOP Chair) than she will ever spend on her expense reports.

Really, like a junkie? Because she split a lobster dinner with another state employee and paid the book rate at a conference hotel?

The MNGOP is supposed to be the party of business, but their brain trust can’t figure out an expense report. Let me help. Otto traveled on December 8th (on a Saturday to qualify for a lower air fare) and  returned on the 12th, the time for which she submitted her controversial expense report. The state meal reimbursement is $31 per day. She claimed $90.48 for the period, not just for one day.

We trust our readers here to do their own math.

As for the claims about exorbitant hotel rates, ask your own company CEO what he thinks a top executive’s time is worth and whether he goes to Days Inn to save the shareholders money. Or whether the cheap hotel savings would be spent on cabs back and forth from the conference hotel.

The PERA, for which Otto is a trustee, budgets for its trustees to attend two conferences. As near as I can tell, she only attended one for the year in question.

Maddow to Obama: Stop Feeding the Dog at the Table.

Rachel Maddow deconstructs the Fox News take down of Shirley Sherrod and asks, who's next in the campaign to help white people feel aggrieved about black racism?

Let's see, ACORN, Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP, New Black Panthers...

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Doing the Tip Credit Shuffle.

Michael Saltsman's op/ed today on Minnesota's tip credit purports to explain the issue from an employer's and a economist's point of view. (Commenters at the Strib have already outed the PR-firm-created Employment Policies Institute with which Saltsman is affiliated.)

He paints a picture of the financial impact of a tip credit on a

hypothetical restaurant with part-time employees [that] averages 300 employee hours per day, 365 days a year. An extra dollar per hour translates into an additional $109,500 a year in labor costs (before you add additional payroll taxes), meaning the restaurant will have to generate an additional $2.2 million in revenue just to break even.

and says " it's hard to figure out where that much extra money — $6,000 a day, to be exact — would come from."

Exactly. Especially if you're looking at the colorful scarf while he pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

His restaurant would require 37.5 tipped employees working eight-hour shifts every day to hit 300 hours. Not exactly your struggling neighborhood bistro.

Second, there's no "additional" labor cost required to break even, because Minnesota is not taking away a tip credit. Menu prices, staffing levels and profits are set by the owner taking into account the local market and a law that's been in place for decades.

So, yes, the hypothetical owners with the hypothetical staff under a hypothetical change in the law will  compensate in this way:

Avoid the expense altogether by cutting labor costs in other ways. Restaurants that used to employ servers who took care of three tables each now have a single server waiting on four or five. As a customer, you get your food but with less attention paid when you need something extra.

And hypothetical customers, through their tips, can decide to pay servers directly for better service, just like they do today — while the middleman looks on and pays a little as possible to his employees.

Shelter Report: Moving Days.

Last week on the playground I saw Angelina, a sweet girl usually in school, on the other side of the fence.

I asked why she wasn't in school, and she said, with a radiant look, "Because we're moving!"

Because of staffing levels, we had to restrict the preschool to 16 kids today. In the past two weeks, it has been almost a new a place, with a lot of children gone and new faces coming in.

A couple kids in the current class, including a pair of sisters who have a number of other young siblings, said they are moving this week, too.

Kids are supposed to leave, and when they get a new, stable place outside the shelter, it's a happy day. I'll miss some of them, but don't want to see them again.

If I do, it will likely mean the bottom fell out.

One girl who has been here the longest and is a bit of a drama queen said today to one of the other kids, "I don't have a brother no more, just two sisters, one mommy and one dad."

I'm not sure what that meant, and don't particularly want to find out.

Because I can't do anything about it. But I can make four of their hours be the best they can be.

Colorado GOP Candidate Needs Help. Paging Robert Erickson.

While Minnesota's GOP nominee for governor Tom Emmer is thanking Robert Erickson today for changing the subject at a disastrous town hall meeting with restaurant servers, Colorado's nominee Scott McInnis is trying to get Erickson's number.

McInnis needs a squirrel, any squirrel.

The McInnis campaign is reeling after a series of reports that opinion pieces and a series of "Musings on Water" essays, for which he was paid $300,000 contained plagiarized material. The editorial board of the  Denver Post, which reported the original stories, has called for him to withdraw from the race — and in an unlikely convergence, talk radio righties agree.

McInnis used to represent Colorado in Congress, from the same district that produced the fictional "The West Wing" representative and eventual vice president Bingo Bob Russell. I've never known for sure whether that was a coincidence.

Politicians have overcome plagiarism claims before. (See the current, real VP.) But prolix politicians lifting passages for speeches is a lower-order offense than taking pay — big pay, all you out-of-work journalists will note — to recycle material for a think tank.

As a fellow of the Hasan Family Foundation, McInnis was paid $150,000 a year over two years to do speaking engagements and "research and write a monthly article on water issues that can be distributed to media and organizations as well as be available on the Internet."

At 13 grand a pop, you'd think he might pay closer attention to the content of his "original work."

McInnis's response to the flap hasn't helped him one bit.

Hey, Robert Erickson, they have an immigration debate in Colorado, too, and Tom Tancredo is old news.

All Candidates are on Equal Footing in MInnesota.

Dick Cheney did it. George W. Bush did it. Hillary Clinton did it.

But Tom Emmer, Tom Horner and Matt Entenza will not.

To be fair, federal law requires disclosure of tax returns by candidates. Minnesota law does not, so the refuseniks are within their rights.

People who believe in transparency in government have a case that financial disclosure, including a spouse's income, provides insight into what influences may come into play if that candidate is elected.

Those who believe financial privacy should prevail are in the minority, it appears. Many other states mandate disclosure of a spouse's income and financial assets.

All I have to add here is that candidate financial disclosure is one place in Minnesota where gay and lesbian couples have the same rights as married couples!

Here's the Business Lesson Tom Emmer Needs to Get.

Tom Emmer keeps digging a hole with his War on the Minimum Wage.

He just can't stop himself from talking about servers who are making more than restaurant owners because they receive tips in addition to minimum wage. He says something has to be done.

No matter that this claim has been thoroughly debunked.

No matter that the tips come from customers who are making a judgment about the value of the service they received from an individual worker. Why does that exempt the owner from paying employees for their basic performance?

No matter that the amount a business owner might save through a tip credit is negligible and is unlikely to affect menu prices, wages of other employees or result in additional jobs.

No matter that the tip credit penalizes some of the restaurant's top performers, the very type of people the GOP considers their core constituency.

Emmer is tying himself in knots trying to make a point about a minor issue in the greater scheme of what a serious governor must to address. Why is that?

Well, here's a very good indication, from a comment in this post at Talking Points Memo [h/t Hal Davis]:

To folks like Emmert,[sic] the owners are "providing jobs" and investing "their families' future," while workers provide nothing of value to make that investment pay off. Restauranteers are all Galt-like figures whose efforts are cruelly exploited by the people waiting their tables.

The idea that there could ever be any sort of partnership between management and labor is alien to them. The relationship between owner and employee is, in their minds, the same as the relationship between a healthy animal and a leech.

Are you really listening on that listening tour, Tom?

As a former business owner, I can attest that my employees — most of them, anyway — also invested their family's future in my company. They provided the ideas, customer service and effort that — because I had multiple employees — allowed me to make more money that I could possibly make through my own labors, no matter how smart I was or how hard I worked.

In my business, if any employee made more money than I did, it was because they produced substantial revenue and customer satisfaction for the company. And I never resented that fact, because I wrote the check — unlike Emmer's fantasy restaurateurs, whose customers directly pay for that performance.

It's true, only one employee ever drew a bigger check than I. But because I rewarded him and other key employees for creating value for my business, they stuck around.

Two of them now own the company.

That's how it's supposed to work in America, Rep. Emmer. Not by niggling over a few bucks earned by your front line people and whining about government.

Are Tips Really a Jobs Issue?

A lot has already been written about GOP candidate for governor Tom Emmer's claim that forcing restaurant owners to pay minimum wages for workers who also receive tip income burdens the businesses.

Minnesota prohibits a "tip credit" that would allow these employers to avoid paying the full minimum wage. Both Emmer and Independence candidate Tom Horner contend that this potentially hurts businesses in the food service industry.

Too many pixels have died from bloggers and commenters focused on the wrong part of the question, doing speculative math because the Strib's story didn't ask the basic question: Is what Emmer said about $100,000 waiters true?

Strib columnist Jon Tevlin did talk to the owners who supposedly told Emmer about the highly compensated waiters they employed. Not surprisingly, the owner claims a misquote: "No way, shape or form did I [tell Emmer] anyone made $100,000."

The truth is, tips already enable the industry to get away with paying its hourly workers less. Minnesota eating and drinking establishments account for 7.6% of the state's hourly workers — but for almost 54% of all hourly workers at or below the federal effective minimum wage of $6.55 [Download]. And 69% of these workers receive overtime pay, tips or commissions. (The reports don't break out tips individually.)

The conservative spin on Emmer's position comes from Mitch Berg, who says:

This is entirely about bringing jobs back to the hospitality business in Minnesota.

If you've been paying attention at all to claims from Camp Emmer, you know you have to check these things.

According to the state's Department of Employment and Economic Development, jobs in the hospitality industry did fall off starting in late 2007, about the time the recession began to gain steam. Before that, jobs, number of establishments, total wages and average wages grew steadily.

Industry codes changed in 2000, so it's difficult to compare earlier data, but I found a study that showed steady growth in personal income from Minnesota eating & drinking establishments from 1969-1999 [Download].

If the lack of a tip credit has been killing jobs, it apparently didn't make a difference until the whole economy took a dive.

Economist and GOP legislative candidate King Banaian finds there's scant evidence to support the idea that higher tipped minimum wages do much to boost server pay. So who benefits?

To put this all another way, as a group, proportionately more workers who receive tips are already paid relatively lower wages than hourly workers in other industries and occupations. The claim that restaurant owners are hurt because they can't lower their wages even more doesn't seem supported by the data.

And they aren't going to bring in more business by hiring more servers at even lower wages. At least, the past growth didn't occur that way.

This brings us back to Mitch:

So here’s the question:  are the “workers at the bottom of the pay ladder” better off hustling for tips (which can be volatile and low, and can also be really really good money), or out of work entirely?

Because in this economy, that’s pretty much the choice.

Unless you look at the facts.

Or Priuses with NRA Stickers.

Saw this when I was parking my bike at Byerly's today. I wonder how many Hummers have Critical Habitat plates.

Probably more than there are Mini Coopers with bumper hitches.