The week in work: non-apocalyptic ravings, millennial tensions, dialing for dollars, a lion, a bear, and a lot of squirrels.
They even commissioned a photo illustration, it’s that serious
When you see a headline like “Apocalypse Not” on a story about Seattle’s $15 minimum wage, you expect to click through to a piece in an alt-weekly or lefty blog — not the region’s leading business publication. And yet it was in fact the Puget Sound Business Journal that looked back at Seattle business claims about the effects $15 would have… and found only “the cuts that never came.”
The excellent but unfortunately paywalled piece quickly prompted a fact-abusing pushback from the right-wing Washington Policy Center which repeatedly conflates the metro area with the city, and their imagination with reality. Which is great: when the wingnuts are trying to start a blog fight with a business newspaper, it’s another indication of how far the ground is shifting.
Is that really the best reason they could come up with?
There are two things that everyone writing about millennials seem to agree on: 1) there are a whole lot of them, though counts vary, and 2) they are unpleasant co-workers, for reasons amounting to the pet peeve of the writer’s choosing.
Attempting to challenge those perceptions, a Human Resources advice columnist scrounged up a listicle of a few things that are good about the generation. Reason #1: they’re deeply in debt and so need the work bad.
Either they’re paying way too much per minute or they’re using a call center
Big business groups led by the chamber of commerce and the restaurant association have spent just shy of $100,000 in Tacoma this year, campaigning to raise the minimum wage to $12 in an attempt to head off a local grassroots 15now ballot measure.
That’s a lot of money to come from just 16 sources in a city the size of Tacoma, but it might not buy much at the rate these same folks are spending in Seattle. A recent disclosure logged $21,000 of spending by big business in support of two candidates — which only paid for 19,600 GOTV calls.
Last call of the wild
An unnamed South African lion killed one of three humans who were hunting without a license near its home on a private game farm. The lion will not face charges, neither will the property owners or the other three hunters, and no dentists were involved.
An unnamed Florida black bear ambushed a man by jumping out from the cover of a dumpster at a Sportsman’s Lodge the night before the state allowed licensed bear hunting for the first time in decades. The victim survived his wounds and explained that “you never know what a bear’s going to do,” while state officials recommended people “fight back aggressively” if a black bear attacks.
And squirrels are causing a national wave of frustration by nibbling pumpkins displayed on porches for Halloween, not because they like them but because they are there. The leader of a national squirrel research project suggests stuffing the pumpkins with nuts, and notes plaintively that “we love to see squirrels hopping around in our neighborhoods, but we’re dismayed by their activities.”