It looks like the Golden Gate Restaurant Association endorsed it[0]. I couldn't find a list of which restaurants are members of the GGRA, but the board of directors[1] includes people from the Bluestem Brasserie, San Francisco Soup Company, Ladle and Leaf, Extreme Pizza, Rose's Cafe, Wayfare Tavern, Souvla, Canela, Palm House, The Dorian, and Perry's.
If the goal is to help restaurants, wouldn't a better approach be to build more housing so that:
1) There are more people in the areas with offices who are around to eat dinner. Therefore, restaurants aren't so dependent on the lunch money of office workers.
2) Restaurant workers can get cheaper rent and therefore restaurants can find staff more easily.
The GGRA includes nearly every significant restaurant in the Bay Area. Hope you like cooking.
Your position is something like, “Man this Donald Trump guy is f’in horrible. Give me a list of all Americans so I can remember to never talk to them again.”
No, they should react much worse than that. If you buy the businesses out, you're handing them a financial reward for their obnoxious regulatory behavior.
All of the tech workers should boycott the restaurants involved in this political move. Tech workers in the bay area control most of the volume of high-end consumer spending (ie a lot of workers making a lot of money). It would decimate the targeted restaurants instantly.
Sometimes I'll get into 'productive' first thing, at 10amish. Other times it takes a few hours, so it's random.
Once I get into productive mode I'd rather not get out of it until I'm finished, and leaving my desk for more than a few minutes, or having to concentrate of complex tasks like talking to someone at a counter, is sure to do that.
There is rush. Tell that to people who die because medical technology is delayed years. Or companies that fail or never materialize because the products take too long to produce and are too expensive.
You can order by phone or online in advance so you only have to walk to the restaurant to pick up your food.
Maybe you don't like the walking, but then think again: it has been shown many times that some physical movement during the working day is beneficial for your productivity and health.
If you really want to avoid leaving the building at all costs, there is also another option: ordering your lunch and let it be delivered.
Why are you assuming there even are restaurants near the office? A bunch of people getting into their cars and clogging up roads at lunch time doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
Yes, assuming a standard stride length of 0.7 metres and favourable traffic conditions, each lunch attendee could be expected to achieve 2900 steps. If travelling as a group there could be a minor social interaction every 4-10 steps thus leading to over 700 conversational actions which may help build camaraderie, strengthening team bonds and inproving the overall efficiency of the team.
But is not it really a one hour break? Besides eating, shouldn't you rest a bit during a day? I guess companies with onsite cafeterias trying to squeeze every minute from their employees.
Yes, it's not about the money. It's about slavery. Tech giants want their workers to spend as much time as possible near their working places. Even during their lunch time when people are supposed to get some rest from their jobs, walk to the nearby restaurant, maybe meet some new people instead of those faces they see every f'ng day. NO! Facebook, etc. don't allow any distraction. They wrap slavery in shiny candies and give it to employees who are so happy that they are bragging about sushi, whatever to instagram. The new regulations are going to break that and that's perfect!
I've read a number of definitions of slavery coming from a variety of political perspectives. Some go so far as to term hiring anyone who isn't independently wealthy to work for wages "slavery".
None of them included giving employees perks in the hope that it will increase their productivity.
They definitely want to increase your productivity, you are right. Your productivity drives their revenue forward. They are willing to contribute small amount of that revenue for giving you free food. But do you really want to be like that? Work harder for free food?
I don't think the purpose of free food is to incentivize employees to work harder. It's to let employees have lunch in the office without having to leave. As mentioned several times in the comments here, employees at companies that provide this option tend to like it.
Indeed they don't lock employees inside the building. Indeed it's far from slavery. It's wrong word. Rather it's exploiting of employees by using cheap tricks.
This is what I do. I spend negligible amount of time for lunch by bringing the food from home, quickly microwaving it, eating as quickly as possible. But, I am pretty sure that free food takes much longer. You want to try this sushi and that fried ice-cream..oh wait and Philz Coffee offers new beans..there are also your co-workers around and you chat with them endlessly.
Problem is the employee is taxed on those funds AND those funds aren’t tax deductible for the employer like dine in (50%) or in house food (100%) so it’s nowhere near comperable.
Would this card be used at the company cafeteria, or at local restaurants?
If it's the former, then I think it's still "free food".
If it's the latter, then it removes much of the benefit of the company providing the meal -- keeping employees on-campus and near their desks longer. I like my company's free food since it's easy to walk down the hall and eat a quick lunch between meetings, no need to take an hour to head off campus to a local restaurant. I don't care that the food is "free", but that it's fast and convenient.
And for the employees. I don't want to pack a lunch or go seek out a restaurant every day to pick up food. I know that eating at work means I'm spending lunch time in the office, but by spending less time at lunch, I can leave the office earlier. I'm sure it's a net-win for the company -- if an employee is in the office for an extra 15 minutes since they got a "free" lunch, then the meal is more than paid for (assuming tech-worker salaries)
Depending on legislature, it can be a win-win situation.
Example: Currently living in Switzerland, which has "Lunch cheques" [0]. Employees don't pay income tax on their value, employers don't pay social security on their value, local restaurants/takeaways get more customers.
That's a "win-win" if you just take these particular employees and their company into account. It's a net loss for the state and the rest of its citizens however.
I can tell you what I learned from my undergrad econ professors. Every time you see regulations that look like they hurt an industry, you will inevitably find the biggest player in said industry pushing for it. For large companies, the cost of compliance is a smaller percentage of their total costs than for smaller companies, and so it acts as a moat for smaller players trying to break into the industry, effectively reducing competition, and keeping prices high.
So, conspiracy theory or not, it's very plausible that the large established players had a hand in drafting this law.
If they tried to take the cafes away from existing tech employees, they would have a riot on their hands. Googlers and Facebookers would burn the city to the ground. It is an intensely beloved part of the job.
Why do you think that's something any of those employees desire? They make significantly more money, have more benefits, and likely work fewer hours than any union employees in the US. Additionally, unions in the US tend to base pay on seniority rather than any kind of merit, which is a huge turn-off for ambitious people.
> Googlers and Facebookers would burn the city to the ground.
At most, they would make a website with a little game featuring an animation of the city burning down, then giggle and and share it with each other, all the while deaf to the irony that, in reality, they already are burning it down; they just can’t see it. The disconcern behind your whining threat exerts, on the broader population, a blunt misery of slow-burning economic torture the likes of which the tech worker’s comforts will not afford them to perceive. A real fire would at least offer closure and hope amidst a new beginning. This one just keeps blistering.
There is a disconnect here. When you make 10 times more money at Google than the average American and then start threatening to "Burn google down" if the free lunches go away, it looks like a scene from a different world to a low-skilled worker.
A bit of decency from some of the best paid employees in America would go a long way. This is not what I see in the arrogant, know-it-all attitude of most Googlers though.
Probably not a conspiracy theory. Just an inevitable "if you can't beat em, join em" sort of mentality. For big companies regulation is generally easier to build loopholes into than fight.
Politicians either don't give a shit about startups because they don't fill their campaign coffers or just plain don't understand the ecosystem. Techies need to take over Bay area politics.
Techies have been trying to fix the disaster that is SF for a long time. They're very clearly not turning a blind eye. They're being politically obstructed by the long entrenched, old elite that control the political class.
There are only two possible solutions: take the action up several levels financially and get extremely bellicose; or wait until the owners of the political class in SF age out and lose their control.
I get that this is an issue close to the heart of people on this site, but if you accept that this is a good law (which of course can be debated), then this is the only realistic way to introduce it. Perhaps they should have included a provision for gradually phasing out the existing cafeterias.
On a slightly off topic note, when your company gets to cafeteria size are you really a startup any more?
Cool, so start-ups lose a potential hiring perk to the incumbents.
(Does anyone know the story behind this bill? Which politicians and restaurants supported it? I’d like to avoid the latter going forward.)