The Seattle City Council wants to decide how many hours your employees can work

The Seattle City Council seems to have no ability to schedule our police officers for overtime. We’ve had third party reviews say that they don’t know how to do it.

But that’s not stopping them from going after sandwich shops, food trucks and bars to say “we’re going to take over your scheduling. We’re going to decide how many hours your employees can work, if working double shifts are allowed, if employees can close and open on the same weekend.”

This is 100 percent driven by the unions. And this is going to affect how many people get hired in the city.

The city council contracted a survey that was done by the University of Washington. But it just so happens that a visiting scholar, Philip Garland, looked at the survey and said that it was “poorly designed and unreliable”. Manufactured to yield results that Mayor Ed Murray, council members and special interests wanted.

Garland adamantly said that “this should not be used as the basis for the city to craft regulations restricting how employers schedule and manage their workforce. The methodology was sub-standard to accurately represent the Seattle worker population.” He goes into a lot of detail of why this survey was cooked.

Oh, and who is this guy? He’s the former Vice-President of Methodology for the world’s largest web-based survey company, Survey Monkey. He seems pretty uniquely qualified to talk about a survey.

This is the city council doing what they do. There is no problem. They consider businesses to be a necessary evil. They can’t handle their own business but they’re going to get all up in yours.