The SEIU is in the union business. They don’t care if their “Fight for $15” and “Good Cause for termination” campaigns results in 50K low-wage workers losing their jobs, due to automation or reduced hiring, as long as the union ultimately organizes and gets more dues-paying members as a result.

U.S. local/state/federal governments have an absolute duty & authority to closely regulate all aspects of private commerce & economic activity within their jurisdictions.

That is very clearly stated in the US/NY Constitutions and New York City Charter.

From the perspective of SEIU, non-union restaurants going out of business is a good thing.

Bob

That NYT article gives a couple examples of people claiming to have been fired unfairly, but entirely leaves out the employers’ sides of the story. The Chipotle employee, for instance, who claimed to have been fired for not smiling enough, may well have been repeatedly counseled for having a bad attitude in a customer-facing role. The Taco Bell employee who “was fired without warning from a Taco Bell in Queens after she swore at a delivery driver who was harassing her” may have been justified, or it may have been a fight on the sales floor over a baseless accusation.

We don’t know, because the NYT is completely uninterested in exploring that. I’ve worked retail, and I’ve seen plenty of employees insisting it’s entirely unfair that they were fired for one trivial thing, when they were actually drunk on the job, swearing at a customer, and had a file thick with previous warnings. Sometimes one “minor” offense is the last in a long line of other offenses.

I’m just skeptical about these articles where only one side gets to speak.