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geo

Fast Food Workers in cities want $15 an hour and not $7.50

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The people that really get screwed are the non franchised fast food workers. Those people usually can get tips though, but otherwise if this goes through and the fast food chains give in.... the non fast food chains will lose their employees unless they compensate. Those that stick around in the non franchises will still be making $7.50 instead of $15. The smaller places might not have the money to get to $15 per hour.

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geo said:

The people that really get screwed are the non franchised fast food workers. Those people usually can get tips though, but otherwise if this goes through and the fast food chains give in.... the non fast food chains will lose their employees unless they compensate. Those that stick around in the non franchises will still be making $7.50 instead of $15. The smaller places might not have the money to get to $15 per hour.


And this goes for ALL currently minimum wage employees.

It'll be a domino effect, the only thing changing is the amount of money. Everybody gets paid more, everything costs more. It won't benefit anybody.

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Correct, but people working teen jobs need that $15 to live. I just went to a McDonalds in downtown Chicago. It didn't look like a strike was happening. On top of that their $1 value menu was $2.

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In welding, you either freeze your ass/burn under sun with the protective gear on, probable to get some burns, and possibility to get some mild nausea from those welding gases, most notable being zinc chills if there is not good ventilation. With €9 minimum hour wage.
I have no experience in working those burger bars, but if I imagine correctly... All times pressure on where over 20 hungry people are ordering their quick meals, kitchen being hot enough (add faulty or no ventilation) and probability to get some burns if that grease spills out. With about... 7.50$ roughly converted to €5 I guess?

Yeah, I think I can sympathize them.

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Shouldn't all of these bad fast food jobs be reason enough why people would move onto something else?

The fact they stay in such horrible jobs for such little pay says something. If there were better jobs around for the same minimum wage and people moved on, then fast food franchises would have to increase their pay to keep workers around and be more desirable for such a horrible job.

Is it there are no jobs or there is no education to go onto better jobs? Is everything is priced too high in big cities or otherwise that they can pay for the education. Is it because people buy frivolous things instead of paying rent or having a roommate? Is it because they're so comfortable in their job that they don't want to move on, but rather move up?

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geo said:
Is it there are no jobs or there is no education to go onto better jobs?


Yes.

geo said:
Is everything is priced too high in big cities or otherwise that they can pay for the education.


Yes.

geo said:
Is it because people buy frivolous things instead of paying rent or having a roommate? Is it because they're so comfortable in their job that they don't want to move on, but rather move up?


for some, yes, no doubt these two apply too, but, usually, it's more of the first two. The cost of living has gone up greatly the past few years, inflation being part of it; but minimum wage hasn't changed to reflect that. I'm not sure I agree with minimum wage being raised up to $15, but it should at least be $11.

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Excessive campaigning/striking always carries the risk of being replaced with a Pakistani or Bangladeshi that works twice as hard for half the money and with no demand for benefits or pension contributions, and the Pakistani himself won't be immune from being fired if he complains too much (AKA: at all). Actually, with labor law being so liberal in the USA, I wonder what has prevented this from happening on a large scale already.

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I work in food service and my job can be easy or hard. The actual work involved with it is actually hilariously stupified sometimes. But powerful time-management skills and coping with high volumes of agitated people are definitely an unwritten requirement if you don't want to hate your life while you work there. I'm a firm believer that people create their own stress. I'm a manager, and generally I go to work, do my job, mind my own business and then come home. But I also work with people, including non-managers who are overly concerned about other people not doing their job, or how they never get the help they need when they need it, and they always have headaches the entire time they're there, then go home thinking about work and talking to their loved ones about what a shitty day they had today. I feel for those people sometimes, because the compensation is nowhere near the level of stress they deal with.

But I'm not saying that we're underpaid. I don't live in a city, but I do live in a highly taxed area and even with my 'just barely over minimum wage' income I still manage to live comfortable within my few assets. I've been living this way for a long enough while now that I've adjusted to it and I hardly feel oppressed, however I'm certain that the majority of our customer base at my workplace wouldn't last a week making the same sacrifices I do. I'm not sure how these people would live if their only cars were from 1998 or older, or didn't have smartphones, had to go to the library to use internet or rent a movie, cook their own food, or had to drink tap water.

I'm pretty comfortable in my living conditions, but I doubt people who are getting compensated much higher than me really work harder, or smarter than I do, or even have skills or qualifications that I wouldn't be able to obtain with ease. A job is just a job in the end, and if you do it long enough it becomes a piece of cake. I do take issue with actors/actresses, pop artists, and athletes though. They're great role models (sometimes) but their income is way too bloated for how little they do.

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40oz said:

cook their own food, or had to drink tap water.


...are those considered sacrifices or signs of a low standard of life, now? O_o ;_;

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Maes said:

...are those considered sacrifices or signs of a low standard of life, now? O_o ;_;


In America, yes.

I prefer doing this though, since the stuff I can cook up for a quarter of the cost of dining out tastes about twice as good.

Except Japanese food. I haven't gotten good at that yet.

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Maes said:

...are those considered sacrifices or signs of a low standard of life, now? O_o ;_;


Where I work, we have a pretty large volume of "regular customers" who come in daily, sometimes three or four times in one day, and are apparently on a strict diet of energy drinks and meatball sandwiches. They got the money to pay for that lifestyle, but I sure as hell don't.

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40oz said:

Where I work, we have a pretty large volume of "regular customers" who come in daily, sometimes three or four times in one day, and are apparently on a strict diet of energy drinks and meatball sandwiches. They got the money to pay for that lifestyle, but I sure as hell don't.


Well, there's the redneck/Bukowski version of that "lifestyle" as well: ready-made frozen hamburgers/meatballs are probably quite cheaper, and energy drinks can be found for as low as 2.5~3$ for 1.5l of this. I don't know how long you'd go on before developing some sort of medical problem, though...

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I don't eat out much, in fact it's usually nothing more than just grabbing the $2 nachos (with lots of salsa & jalapenos) from the 7-11, maybe once a week. But I'm probably not saving money compared to eating fast food. My weekly grocery bill is around $70-100, and that's just for me. That said, it's much healthier and more satisfying than the fast food junk. Maybe if I lived in India or Greece, then things would be different...

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hex11 said:

Maybe if I lived in India or Greece, then things would be different...


You'd become a gyros greaser/slob in no time :-p

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10 an hour and full time hours yes. 15 an hour and full time hours? No. They are over worked and under payed, but a line has to be drawn somewhere. I didn't bust my ass through school to have someone at Mc Donald's make close to what I do.

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I hear you Satyr ^^^

40oz said:

cook their own food, or had to drink tap water.


I've got money and money saved, I always cook my own food and drink tap water. My gf is highly in debt, the extent of which I don't know and she ALWAYS goes out to eat, either to McDonalds or more expensive places and she only drinks bottled water or Diet Coke.

I've compared our living expenses for food and drink. If I remember, I spent a few thousand less than her per year on such things. I think without going out a single person can spend $3,000 per year on food. A person that lives on Ramen and $1 meals can spend $1,000 per year on food, but its just not healthy.

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Satyr000 said:

I didn't bust my ass through school to have someone at Mc Donald's make close to what I do.

What did you bust your ass through school for then? Because $15 really isn't a whole lot either, particularly for someone with a degree, unless it's just your starting wage. But then why would you be upset? That 10 to 15 dollars is the ceiling for those people, not the floor.

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Satyr000 said:

I didn't bust my ass through school to have someone at Mc Donald's make close to what I do.


In Greece today, an illegal immigrant working as an unskilled worker can easily net more than someone who "bust his ass through school", with "school" usually entailing 4 or 5-year university, plus a MSc and a PhD in a lot of cases (don't be surprised, Greece has probably the largest proportion of over-educated and over-qualified people relative to what the local economy can properly absorb).

How is that even possible? Simple: an unskilled job such as lifting crates or working in the field usually pays 30-35 Eur a day, with the catch that it's all "black money", aka no benefits or anything. Assuming a full working week plus saturdays, that's easily close to 900 Eur a month, all net and tax-free. For the employer, the savings on contributions, red tape/paperwork and hiding the magnitude and turnover of his business by using illegal/undeclered workers, are priceless, and the risk:benefit analysis of getting caught is clearly biased towards the benefit side.

On the converse, a regularly hired private sector worker in Greece nowadays can't hope for salaries significantly higher than the rest of Eastern Europe. And the conditions/benefits are usually not much better than the unskilled work in the fields. Even highly specialized senior IT positions seldom reach 4-figures pre-tax and pre=contributions. Most would be glad to make 7.5$ an hour in a country with a far better rule of law and taxation fairness, such as the U.S.A.

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Quast said:

What did you bust your ass through school for then? Because $15 really isn't a whole lot either, particularly for someone with a degree, unless it's just your starting wage. But then why would you be upset? That 10 to 15 dollars is the ceiling for those people, not the floor.


It depends on the degree. My company manages to find freelance graphic designers with degrees for $15 per hour. One guy asked for a raise after a year of on and off work. He said he didn't pay $22K per semester to get paid $15 an hour. So our company just found someone else.

... come to think of it. $22,000 * 4 semesters (if not 8) / $15 per hour = 5,866 hours / 40 hours per week = 146 weeks / 52 weeks per year = 2.8 years. That probably doesn't include if he took out a loan.

Our company is also kind of exploitative. They can get uneducated yet talented teens to work for cheaper. They're all over Deviant Art.

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Rayzik said:

And this goes for ALL currently minimum wage employees.

It'll be a domino effect, the only thing changing is the amount of money. Everybody gets paid more, everything costs more. It won't benefit anybody.

That really depends.

If the low wages are increased faster than the high wages, then social inequalities are reduced, which also causes a decrease in crime, unemployment, and the likes. But the 1% feels like their high-score has decreased, so it is unacceptable.

If high wages are increased faster than low wages, then social inequalities increase, which also increase crime and unemployment. But the 1% gets to have more of the pie to themselves, so it is the preferred approach.

Wait no, the preferred approach is to increase high wages while lowering low wages.

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Man, if pay rate was based on the amount of work you perform on the job, I'd have gotten paid minimum wage at my previous job. I worked as a security guard for two years, which usually involved sitting on my ass watching cameras or walking aimlessly through a large building. There was a little bit more to it than that, but that was the basis of my work, and I got paid $15/hr to do it. Compared to the three years I spent working retail, that job was a cakewalk... and the most amount of money I made after having spent three years there was $8.50.

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What my point was, is that I don't feel there are really that many jobs which absolutely require a four-year degree. Unless you're training to be, say, a professional scientist, I have a hard time imagining a job where you couldn't learn all you needed to know in the span of a couple of weeks. Sure, companies may not want to pay for training, but that doesn't mean a four-year degree is necessary to complete the tasks you have to do.

I mean sure, if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, the degree makes sense - there's so much information needed that it'd be impossible to be good at the job after just a couple of weeks of training. On the other hand, though, I could be a teacher, and a successful one, with no training whatsoever. I don't mean to insult teachers, either, I think it's a challenging yet rewarding profession. However, the law requires I spend four years in grad school to become a teacher. Why? I don't know. I have the experience, I have the know-how, I have the passion, but no - I need to spend four years obtaining a piece of paper to prove what I can already demonstrate. On the flip side of things, I can easily ace tests on subjects I don't even really know in the first place.

Point is, what does a piece of paper prove? Why do we use pieces of paper to decide what jobs require skill and what jobs don't? And most importantly, why does a piece of paper determine what skills you do or don't have? It honestly kinda reminds me of the movie trope, "Show, don't tell." If I can demonstrate a particular skill, shouldn't that count more than how much I spent on college? And if I am very skilled in a particular field, shouldn't that matter more in terms of income than whether or not I have a degree?

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An academic degree is most valued as a proof that you have the ability to set a long-term, vague and abstract goal and achieve it, not that you have a highly specific skillset. The only sectors where a degree is useful per-se (down to its grade) are academia and scientific research. Commercial/business sectors operate by entirely different rules, which sometimes may rub against the premises behind a degree, especially in highly variable/volatile fields such as IT.

geekmarine said:

Sure, companies may not want to pay for training, but that doesn't mean a four-year degree is necessary to complete the tasks you have to do.


Companies actually pay for specific skills, no matter how you have acquired them. Sometimes it helps having a piece of paper certifying that you have them, sometimes it doesn't, not the least of reasons being that such a piece of paper doesn't exist.

E.g. in the field of IT, find me a college or university that includes a Cisco, SAP, Oracle, IBM Websphere, Spring, Struts or Hibernate course in its offerings, and that will produce a competence certificate for those particular frameworks on demand (just making an example with specific frameworks and solutions that seem to be highly in demand ATM). That's right, self-training, training by a company making a long-term investment on you or paying for an expensive third-party certification yourself is the only way to acquire any of these.

geekmarine said:

If I can demonstrate a particular skill, shouldn't that count more than how much I spent on college? And if I am very skilled in a particular field, shouldn't that matter more in terms of income than whether or not I have a degree?


See above. In some fields like IT, there are specializations which can indeed be acquired regardless of degrees (actually, preferably without the burden of a generalist's degree), and often are more marketable. Academic degrees tend to be generic and diluted/unfocused, and out of line with what companies are willing to pay for. The hard part is "getting in" this kind of circle. "Wanting in" is not enough.

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geo said:

It depends on the degree. My company manages to find freelance graphic designers with degrees for $15 per hour. One guy asked for a raise after a year of on and off work. He said he didn't pay $22K per semester to get paid $15 an hour. So our company just found someone else.

Of course it depends on the degree. The problem is that people think 'a degree' period is a guaranteed ticket to wealth and prosperity. If and when that doesn't happen, which is fairly often nowadays, I would imagine it shatters that mantra of 'if you work hard then success is inevitable'. And if I can't get wealthy on my investment, then fuck those other people.

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Quast said:

Of course it depends on the degree. The problem is that people think 'a degree' period is a guaranteed ticket to wealth and prosperity.


This holds true for certain types of degree -military academies offer guaranteed employment at the end of your studies, plus their degrees are considered "tertiary education academic degrees" in Greece.

Also, while not a sufficient condition, having as many formal degrees and certifications is a necessary condition to even consider applying to a public sector job -always in Greece-. The more you have, the better. This also explains the high number of over-educated and over-qualified people: it's not unheard of people learning foreign languages (and, importantly, passing recognized certification exams for proficiency in their use at a given level) or obtaining e.g. PhDs just to get ahead for a place in e.g. municipal services or police. Often it doesn't even matter what kind of language, degree, MSc or PhD, as long as it's recognized by the state: it just adds "bonus points" to your tally, and places you ahead of other grunts. At least, unless the hiring process is rigged/photographic (which they often are), in which case even a Nobel prize wouldn't be able to land a job as a municipal janitor :-p

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If and when that doesn't happen, which is fairly often nowadays, I would imagine it shatters that mantra of 'if you work hard then success is inevitable'.


You have to be really entitled to believe success should just fall on your lap just because you've passively followed the footsteps of others and rehashed what you've been told. Having a degree and working hard are two entirely unrelated things, save for a select few professions, and even becoming, say, a doctor, demonstrates endurance more than hard work.

Yes, for a sufficiently loose definition of "hard work" that mantra can be proved wrong. For a sufficiently loose definition of "nice guy" I'm also a gentle person who does EE a public service by debunking terrible life views.

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I've heard that $15 an hour idea is actually spreading to normal restaurants too. Guy I was talking too who owns one says that he doesn't think it'll happen, but if it happens at say, McDonalds, he and other sit-down restaurants may be forced/pressured into a similar vice, in which cases he's sell beer at "ten dollars a glass" or close up, most likely the latter.

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My point was kind of that yeah, you can have the skills, but basically, it doesn't matter if you don't have a degree to prove you have those skills, even if those skills weren't learned at college. It seems to me that we're going through an odd transitional period. On the one hand, employers are beginning to realize that skills, not degrees, are what makes employees valuable. On the other hand, they still seem to be unwilling to risk hiring someone who doesn't have a college degree. Like, "We know you have experience, we know you can do the job, but we're not gonna take a chance if you haven't wasted thousands of dollars on a higher education first." Maybe that's gonna be something to change in the near future, but for now, we're kind of stuck in the middle. You can't get a good job without a college education, but we all know that college doesn't teach you the skills necessary for most jobs (outside of a select few, like academia and whatnot). You can bust your balls and become an expert in virtually any field, but for most fields, it doesn't matter how much you know if you don't have that little piece of paper that says you took out huge loans to earn a degree in something only remotely connected to your actual skill set.

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geekmarine said:

Like, "We know you have experience, we know you can do the job, but we're not gonna take a chance if you haven't wasted thousands of dollars on a higher education first."


Who does that? AFAIK only public/state jobs actually require candidates to provide a fuckton of paperwork for even the most trivial aspects of their application, and of course university/academia/research jobs require study credentials.

But the private sector is a FFA and every employer can set their own rules. Certainly, they often do require some sort of certification for your skills (e.g. it's obvious that a law firm will require nothing short of a legal/paralegal degree, even if it's for clerical work), while in other sectors qualifications are more murky.

E.g. no university or college teaches you to be e.g. an "Account manager" or any other of those imaginative job titles. For those, they usually start from a "tertiary education candidate" of -almost- any kind, and work up from there. At least that's how I understand the Anglo-Saxon and American private sector's modus operandi.

For more technical jobs, a reference from a reputable employer or a certificate from an accredited specialization course is usually required e.g. none is going to believe that you "know your way around CISCO routers" if you didn't actually shell out the cash for an overpriced examination. I'm not sure if that actually classifies as "education" in the traditional sense, though.

geekmarine said:

You can bust your balls and become an expert in virtually any field, but for most fields, it doesn't matter how much you know if you don't have that little piece of paper that says you took out huge loans to earn a degree in something only remotely connected to your actual skill set.


That's the tricky part: no official deegree will ever satisfy any employer 100%, unless it's from a very specific vocational or specialized school and the employer happens to need just that. The "default" type of degree that's churned out by the World's universities however is pretty much "green": aka it means everything and nothing at the same time. Today is pretty much the worst of times to be stuck with just a basic (or even a Master's) degree in anything, but having no real work experience/a network of references/recommendators etc.

It's very hard for a "green" graduate to find a first job. How to get around that varies: taking up ANY job and trying to build connections, actively seeking out internships, migrating abroad etc.

It's not like in the 50s or 60s when an e.g. engineering graduate would be "booked" by 3-4 different companies before even defending his graduation thesis.

geekmarine said:

You can bust your balls and become an expert in virtually any field, but for most fields[/q]


Watch the Twilight Zone episode The Mind of Simon Foster for an extreme example of just HOW MUCH flexibility and expertise might be required in the future *grin*

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geekmarine said:

Are people really going to raise such a fuss over their Big Macs costing $.68 more?


The people living off "disabled" benefits because they're a bit fat will want more benefits.

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