By Zahra Tayeb
Business Insider, Jul 11, 2021
Business owners say they're struggling to find staff. Not so the CEO of &pizza, a restaurant chain in Washington, DC, who claims that he's been bombarded with job applications.
Michael Lastoria told Insider that business was booming at the pizza chain's 51 locations and all were fully staffed. He said that the secret was paying staff a proper wage. ...
While opening 12 new locations this year, Lastoria said he'd received well over 100 applications for each job. "Our new locations are fully staffed and we plan to open another 15 by the end of the year," he said.
Lastoria said he'd been able to dodge the labor shortage by leveraging an employee-centric business model that involves paying staff $16 an hour on average, among other benefits.
"We are living proof that the claims that business owners are making about the impossibility of paying people enough money to live on are false," Lastoria said. Those claims were designed to protect the old corporate mindset that permits shockingly high executive pay and staff exploitation, he said. ...
The fact that the average minimum wage worker has to work 79 hours a week to afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment is the real crisis, Lastoria said. "There isn't a labor shortage, there is a shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage.
"The idea that wages couldn't possibly rise even once over the past 12 years while prices went up, while inflation went up and while the cost of living went up, has resulted in the 'shortage' [business owners] are experiencing today.
"Higher wages lead to greater consumer spending and greater workforce productivity, things every company benefits from." ...
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