Franchise pays wages, not corporation
Demonstrators on Thursday enter a McDonald’s on Fifth Avenue near Seattle Center calling for better wages and urging workers there to join them in walking off the job, but they were unsuccessful. Similar demonstrations took place in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee. (Dean Rutz / The Seattle Times)
The organizers of today’s food-service worker’s strike claim that large corporations can afford to raise wages because of record profits [“Fast-food workers protest,” NWFriday, May 31].Yes, it is true that Subway, for example, has record profits, but Subway Corp. does not pay the workers’ wages. The wages are paid by the franchise, by a small-business man who does not have record profits.
I am the bookkeeper for a man who owns several Subways. We are going to distribute a payroll on Monday. If we paid $15 an hour, it would be about 63 percent bigger. I can assure you he would not be in business very long with that kind of payroll.
We also had a five-figure amount extracted from our checking account this week by the state of Washington to pay sales tax. I wonder what we could pay our workers if we were relieved of that burden.
Mark Strobach, Seattle