Business group sez Seattle's minimum wage law violates their free speech.

Industry Group Files Lawsuit Seeking to Kill Seattle's Minimum Wage, Claiming It Violates Their Free Speech

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/315-19/24218-industry-group-files-lawsuit-seeking-to-kill-seattles-minimum-wage-claiming-it-violates-their-free-speech

Last week, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray (D) signed a bill that will eventually raise his city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. It took eight days for a lobbying group representing major employers like McDonald’s and Taco Bell to file a lawsuit asking the courts to repeal the legislation.

In a sensible world, this lawsuit would have no chance of prevailing. Many of its claims are frivolous — and comically so. The lobbying group argues, for example, that Seattle’s new minimum wage violates the First Amendment because “by increasing the labor costs of franchisees, the Ordinance will reduce the ability of franchisees to dedicate funding to the promotion of their businesses and brands.” In other words, the law requires businesses to spend money paying workers a living wage that they could otherwise spend on advertising, and this somehow violates the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. If this were actually what the Constitution required, then any law imposing costs on anyone would be unconstitutional, including all taxes. After all, every dollar paid in taxes is a dollar that can’t be spent to buy an ad promoting the deliciousness of the Big Mac.

The crux of the lawsuit, however, is rooted in the way Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance treats franchised businesses as opposed to other employers. The ordinance contains two different schedules for large and small businesses that phase in the higher minimum wage at a different pace. Many large businesses, defined as “all employers that employ more than 500 employees in the United States,” are required to pay a $15 minimum wage by 2017, while smaller businesses do not not reach this milestone until 2021. Franchises, such as an individual McDonald’s restaurant, are treated as part of the larger company. So, because McDonald’s as a whole employs over 500 employees, each individual McDonald’s franchise is also subject to the same schedule that applies to large employers.

The lawsuit primarily objects to this decision to classify individual McDonald’s restaurants and other franchises as part of the whole, and it offers several legal challenges to this classification that can generously be described as “imaginative.” It argues for example, that, by treating franchisees of out-of-state companies like McDonald’s differently than mom-and-pop hamburger shops, the Seattle law violates a constitutional doctrine prohibiting states from discriminating against out of state businesses. This argument would have merit if franchisees of in-state companies — like, say, Starbucks — were treated differently under the minimum wage ordinance than McDonald’s franchisees. They aren’t. This claim has no merit.