re: "Fast Food Workers: You Don’t Deserve $15 an Hour to Flip Burgers and That’s OK"

Why would it require 4 people to make a meal? That seems like an awful lot of people to put fries in a bag and meat on a bun....

LINK

Many families are dependent upon fast food wages. Sixty-eight percent are not in school and are single or married adults with or without children, according to the U.C. Berkeley-University of Illinois study. Only 32 percent of the workforce is younger than 23 years of age.

The low wages amount to poverty pay. According to Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit women’s advocacy organization, a full-time wage of $14.17 is needed to live above subsistence levels, according to national averages. In order to make ends meet, 52 percent of fast food workers are enrolled in public benefits programs, according to the U.C. Berkeley-University of Illinois study, at an estimated annual cost of $7 billion to the American taxpayer. Taxpayers provide $1.2 billion to McDonald’s workers alone so that they can hope to achieve a subsistence standard of living. At the expense of its workers and the taxpaying public, the company has managed to privatize its profits while socializing its costs.

Both Major and Cabral mentioned employer intimidation as a primary reason for the still limited participation of their co-workers in the movement. Neither has seen anybody fired for participating in union activity, but they have heard managers disparage unions and broadly threaten workers who would join one, activities that are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Employers capitalize on their employees’ precarious situations because they can get away with it.

“Due to getting minimum wage and living paycheck to paycheck, people are scared, and then managers misinform them and threaten them,” Cabral said. “Some people are scared to be out of a job for one week. If you are out of a job for one week, sometimes you end up in a homeless shelter because you cannot pay your bills.”

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Eurocat

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Do you even have an idea of what wage rates represent? Businesses are not piggy banks. They pay people about the value that they bring to the company. The fact of the matter is that equipment, capital, and technology is far more valuable to fast food joints than the workers. They don't really add much value to each product, so their wages are low.

If we as a society think that those with low marginal productivity capabilities should get government assistance, that is a separate issue.

But, Eurocat, you really need to realize that fast food workers are not paid poverty wages because of irrational whims of businessmen, they are payed poverty wages because, well, their skills don't really contribute all that much to consumer surplus.

If society wants to give these people extra money, they do it through welfare and social programs. It is completely unfair to make businesses shoulder the increased cost because society thinks workers are underpaid.

Eurocat, if you and your friends are so concerned about the low pay of fast food workers, then continue to advocate for safety nets. Don't arbitrarily penalize businesses who merely exist to make final products more valuable than the resources used to make the product.

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I chose a career that I knew would for the most part pay me enough to live above the poverty line.

13 years later with a flawless work record, 100s of hours of continuing education and training, and now a fry cook that can barely read or write and on parole wants to be paid almost as much as me

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if they get 15 dollars a hour, work 40 hours a week, and 50 weeks a year they can make as much as 30k a year. that seems unlikely because most fast food companies don''t let their employees work 40 hours per week at a single job.

if you've worked as hard as you think you have you should surely be doing a bit better than 30k a year by now.

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and are single or married adults with or without children

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You know that is 99.99999% of any population, right? I would say 100%, but nothing is ever 100%.

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A minimum wage will force me to be less greedy.

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Then pay more you selfish prick

I just want a fricking straw with my meal everytime. I shouldn't have to ask for a straw when a meal is ordered to go and a drink is included in the meal. frick

Would there be a big problem with the managers just firing these worthless employees while they strike? And hire any high school kid to take their place?

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This has to be a several part project. 

1. Raise the wage to 15 dollars. 

2. Legislation to outlaw factory like production of food. Say that each meal that is made has to be produced by at least four people (to prevent job losses). 

3. Governmental subsidies for franchises in the interim transition period, three years. 

4. Introduce an "income cap" for franchises, that no franchisee can make more than 20 times what the lowest paid full time employee makes. 

5. Mandatory health care coverage. 

Then this can go through. 

Just raising a salary to 15 is a shallow attempt to create a just result.

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And I really hope this is a joke. Your model provides zero incentive for productivity, which for a society is the main goal, or should be. Giving people good paying jobs and putting caps on wages just for the sake of pandering to the lowest common denominator will run any economic model straight into the ground.