Stakeholder #1

Kumer, Peter. "Steep Seattle Streets" 12/06/14
via Flickr. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

There are many people that have a stake in this controversy. People care a great deal about their earnings as well as the earnings of others. They want people to be able to live off their wages but want businesses to thrive. This is why this is a controversy, because it is so hard to be completely on one side of everything.

Description

The International Franchise Association is the largest and oldest trade group that represents many big name companies in a variety of industries such as McDonald's, the UPS store, and Sport Clips. The IFA is the lobbying body and the association that takes care of political and legal representation for its members. It approaches senators, representatives, and handles court cases that these members are involved in. It stands on its motto of “Building local businesses, one opportunity at a time”. 

Most people do not know that the IFA exists. They do not realize that there is a governing body over these corporations. If people were to encounter the IFA, it would be digitally. Most people would only come across the association if they wanted more information on how a specific franchise is run. The face that the public sees is their website, which is is broken down into franchising opportunities, gives advice for those who own or want to own a franchise, and provides a list of their members. They explain their mission statement which is to protect, enhance, and promote franchising. 

They stand by this in the case of the minimum wage increase in Seattle, which they oppose and are currently suing the City of Seattle for enacting it. Anyone keeping up with this ongoing controversy would see the IFA as a conservative organization fighting for the rights of businesses, and regularly involved in keeping employees from unionizing or pushing for expensive benefits.

Three claims

1.    The first claim that the International Franchise Association is making is, "Our appeal has never sought to prevent the City of Seattle's wage law from going into effect," They do not want the wage increase to fail, they actually want it to succeed, but for the required increases to roll-out to franchisees more slowly than the law states now.

2.  The second claim is that, "Our appeal to the Supreme Court will be focused solely on the discriminatory treatment of franchisees under Seattle's wage law and the motivation to discriminate against interstate commerce." They want to get their business settled and not tread on anything else or lose the purpose of the case. They don’t want this case to lead to any others as well.

3.    The third claim is that, “Seattle’s new minimum wage law unconstitutionally discriminates against franchisees by categorizing them as big businesses even when they are small and independently owned.” They believe that the franchises of Seattle should be given extra time to raise their wages. They are claiming that the city of Seattle is unfairly putting them in the group of employers with the most employees because of the national size. Their point is that the way the law is written, franchisees are treated just like large businesses. The law makes large businesses with over 500 employees increase hourly wages to $11 now and to $15 in 2017, but the IFA wants its members to begin the $11 increase in 2017. They argue that franchisees are run like very small businesses, with few employees, even though they may be under a big-name national company like Subway.

Credibility

These claims are valid. If you think about the true size of the franchise, it is only the size of the stores that the owner owns. It is not fair to connect the owner of a few local stores to the ones nationally because they are all under different management. Franchises are their own businesses underneath the umbrella of a well-known name and product. These are very powerful claims because it puts a great deal of blame on the city and the new wage ordinance it put into law.

Other stakeholders

These claims are very different from the claims of other stakeholders. Other stakeholders, especially other cities and consumers, are more worried about the job retention rate, the actual earnings of employees. It's easy to get behind the idea of paying people more, but not fully understanding longer term what that might mean for the economy of a city due to businesses' profits and prices. They are not worried about if the franchises of Seattle are being treated fairly. In comparing IFA to others, there really are no other stakeholders they are similar to.