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

I have a friend that works in a factory for $7.50 (WI's minimum wage). I told him about this. He said McDonalds paying city workers $15 per hour is bullshit, because his company puts together carts, cabinets, counters for McDonalds and that's pretty grueling work too. The factory gets to 120 degrees in the summer. He said there's no end to his job, it just always keeps coming and if there's downtime you jump to someone else's spot to help them or get yelled at.

McDonalds. Grueling jobs from the ground up.

geekmarine said:

"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."

The risk isn't exactly that they may not do the job, but that the other employees who already work there have the documentation that proves they are qualified for the job. They have justified reason to demand higher pay when they are working alongside people who's credentials are debatable.

Personally I think that's a little fucked up and it's hard to decide who to feel for. The people who may have "wasted" their time and money on college when the skills for their job were pretty easy to obtain elsewhere, or the people who have the skills but aren't being recognized.

My fiance has been trying to talk me out of staying in the food service industry, go back to college, and pursue a higher paying career, but I'm concerned that I will have shelled out a good chunk of my time and savings to do something that may not be all that valuable anymore. It's not easy, but it is possible to make a lot of money with no education to back it up if you genuinely strive to obtain the skills needed for the field you want to work in. That small window opportunity is often enough for me.

geo said:

I have a friend that works in a factory for $7.50 (WI's minimum wage). I told him about this. He said McDonalds paying city workers $15 per hour is bullshit, because his company puts together carts, cabinets, counters for McDonalds and that's pretty grueling work too. The factory gets to 120 degrees in the summer. He said there's no end to his job, it just always keeps coming and if there's downtime you jump to someone else's spot to help them or get yelled at.

McDonalds. Grueling jobs from the ground up.

Fucking america.txt right here. Jesus christ...

Instead of organizing for better pay and or work conditions he'll bitch about people that are? What the fuck? Labor simply has no power whatsoever here publicly or politically. It's just a race to the bottom. Yee-haw

Fuck McDonald's, I can't be arsed to do cooking, I'm applying for WH Smith, where I won't give a shit about only earning £5 an hour because all I'm doing is putting things on shelves and helping customers. WOO BOOKS!

Seriously I'd prefer to work in a book shop instead of McDonald's, I don't like cooking or giving food to people, especially if it's disgustingly unhealthy, I couldn't live with myself if I started giving unhealthy food to people when I should be giving them salads or pasta. I'd work in a pasta/salad/pasta-salad bar, but as I said I'm too lazy to cook. Not that I can cook in the first place.

I say they get that raise because of the sheer mental capacity to ignore ethics on whether or not you should be giving food to people who could just as easily get a healthier yet more delicious option.

And also the cooking thing, that's hard.

In N Out starts workers at $10-$11 an hour. Given how their busy most of them are, this always felt pretty fair to me.

I can honestly that, without a fair amount of debt accumulated, one would need $14/hr full-time to live in a neighborhood in L.A. that isn't along the lines of Inglewood. The fact that I see people in McDonald's working the counter in their '30s or older sometimes bother me. It's not a wage that can cut it in a large city by any means.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/29/us-usa-restaurants-strike-idUSBRE97S05320130829

Many fast-food workers are expected to walk off their jobs today in protest.

I hope they fire them all.

AndrewB said:

I hope they fire them all.

I too also hope corporations that fail to pay livable wages to their labor continue to be subsidized by the government which provides the remainder of said wage, such then that we can then complain about government handouts.

AndrewB said:

I hope they fire them all.

Hooray for solidarity...

dannebubinga said:

Hooray for solidarity...

What's the worst that can happen? A minimum wagin' burger flippin' nigga loses his job? He can live with that.

Workers demanding a fair wage is one of the greatest sin ever imaginable, because it unjustifiably denies the 1% their legitimate prize, which is all the money, all of it.

The natural laws say that the rich should be very rich, and the poor should very poor. Being neither rich nor poor, the middle-class is an aberration that should be eliminated entirely, as it unholy in God's unblinking eye.

Where will the world go if the lowly workers -- the people who are actually responsible for making society work -- obtain the means they need to live in relative comfort? What happens then? Maybe they'll stop needing to use credit for everything, and will stop being indebted to their bank? Maybe the 1% will have less money to squander away in speculative schemes? Maybe public services will get enough funding to actually work? Maybe they will not live in constant fear that everything that they think they own will be repossessed by their true owners? Maybe we will have a financial model that will not trigger crises after crises, and bubble burst and bubble burst?

None of this can be allowed to happen, because if such terrible things were to come to pass, then the commies would win. Obviously. You don't want the commies to win, do you, traitor? No? Good. Then go find the nearest person richest than you, and go give them all your belongings. They deserve it more, as evidenced by the fact they are more wealthy than you are.

Anyone else perplexed by people that complain about welfare moochers and then complain that minimum wage is too high? People making minimum wage tend to need welfare to get by. What exactly do those people want? The number of jobs that are above a livable wage are limited - you can't argue that everyone trying to live independently is capable of obtaining a living-wage job, because there aren't that many jobs out there. A certain percentage of people will have to accept bottom-rung jobs, and that percentage has gone way up in recent years. What's the solution? Seriously, I would love to hear someone give a solution to a problem where there are more people who need to make a living than there are living-wage jobs available.

The argument is always that "Oh, people should just work harder, and they'll get better jobs." There are only so many good jobs. If everyone were as skilled and talented as Bill Gates, you'd still have the need for fry cooks. Not everyone can become a billionaire, no matter what hypothetical circumstances you propose.

So here we have people saying that those people flipping burgers and cleaning toilets don't deserve a living wage. Since a certain percentage of people must take those jobs, they must rely on government assistance. Those same people say that government assistance is wrong. However, they also say that removing the need for government assistance via better pay is also wrong. Ultimately, all I can think is that these people are saying that a certain percentage of the population shouldn't exist, even though we need those jobs to be done.

It's like, those people don't get if you have 8 slices of pizza and 16 people, 8 people are going to go without pizza no matter how much they deserve it. You can't just say, "Well those 8 people should've worked harder for it," because even if they earned the pizza, you'd still have the problem of people not having any. How hard is it to understand that maybe, just maybe, you need to order another friggin' pizza.

geekmarine said:

The argument is always that "Oh, people should just work harder, and they'll get better jobs." There are only so many good jobs. If everyone were as skilled and talented as Bill Gates, you'd still have the need for fry cooks. Not everyone can become a billionaire, no matter what hypothetical circumstances you propose.

Actually, in a Bill Gates-dominated society, there would be far too many hot air salesmen, with none really producing anything. A fry cook with a practical skill (and the gear and raw materials to practice his trade) would actually reign supreme, if the ratio was 100 Bill Gates lookalikes to one fry cook.

I remember reading a Donald Duck/Mickey Mouse story which had exactly this plot: somehow, everybody had become rich through one of Cyrus's inventions gone berserk (though not necessarily skilled a-la Bill Gates). The result? Nobody worked or produced anything (including pumping gas, so cars couldn't circulate), and so to get a pair of running shoes to get to the next town, Donald and his friend had to locate the only craftsman left in their area who knew how to make shoes....for an astronomic price, given that now everybody was rich and whatever little was left worth buying would be terribly inflated in price.

geekmarine said:

So here we have people saying that those people flipping burgers and cleaning toilets don't deserve a living wage.

Again, imagine if NONE cooked or cleaned toilets: only the wealthiest of the "Bill Gates"-lookalikes could afford a clean toilet or a cooked meal, and the cleaner/cook would be a highly paid specialist. The rest would have to do with shitting on the ground and wiping their asses with -hopefully rounded- stones and leaves, when not looking for roots to eat.

geekmarine said:

It's like, those people don't get if you have 8 slices of pizza and 16 people, 8 people are going to go without pizza no matter how much they deserve it. You can't just say, "Well those 8 people should've worked harder for it"

Well, you kinda can: they could have struggled for the pizza to get divided into 16ths instead and/or taken those 8 pieces by force and/or strike a deal so the next available pizza gets shared among different people everytime by rotation and/or ...you name it. Or simply struggle so that there are more pizzas.

The side of the argument that most people haven't heard.

Actually, that's ALL we fucking hear.
Over and over again - giving the working poor an extra dollar per hour will be disastrous for everyone. The prices of Big Macs will skyrocket, or people will lose their benefits or their jobs entirely.

It's corporatist apologist bullshit. Take the difference out of executive pay. The CEO:worker pay ratio is highway robbery. CEOs are taking MORE than their fair share, a wage gap we haven't seen since the Gilded Age. And somehow this is acceptable because, to some people, profitability is the only metric for success in a civilized society. This is why companies crumble these days under their own top-heaviness: CEOs have sacrificed sustainability for short-term profit. The "cost" of raising wages must be offset! But how come executive pay isn't an expense? And if employee wages are an expense, why aren't they getting paid up front for their work?

Oh, and a Berkeley study says that raising the minimum wage has no effect on unemployment.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/12/01/minimumwagejobs/
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf

The minimum wage has no effect on unemployment? Ya-hooo! Let's make it a trillion a year!

geekmarine said:

Anyone else perplexed by people that complain about welfare moochers and then complain that minimum wage is too high?

Most of the right rally for an absolute free market.

Bucket said:

Over and over again - giving the working poor an extra dollar per hour will be disastrous for everyone. The prices of Big Macs will skyrocket, or people will lose their benefits or their jobs entirely.

People seem to have the mindset that a corporation's profit margin isn't beyond 500%.

Technician said:

People seem to have the mindset that a corporation's profit margin isn't beyond 500%.

Many corporations do have large enough profit margins that a change like this won't affect it much normally; however, their biggest threat is that lower profits can lead to stockholders buying back the corporations' shares in an attempt to salvage what return they can get, leading to even further losses.

AndrewB said:

The minimum wage has no effect on unemployment? Ya-hooo! Let's make it a trillion a year!

Is there a rule somewhere that being proven factually wrong MUST elicit a strawman response?

geekmarine said:

Not everyone can become a billionaire, no matter what hypothetical circumstances you propose.

I have one when everybody becomes a billionaire. It's guaranteed to work. Here you go:
1. Have the central bank prints a lot of money. Like, really a lot.
2. Send everybody in the country one billion in those recently-printed banknotes.

"But," you'll say, "if you do that then money becomes worthless!" Exactly. This is exactly what will happen.

You cannot be rich if everybody else is also rich. Wealth is relative: it is a measure of the discrepancy between the resources you own and the resources Joe Average has. You cannot become richer without making other people poorer. This is the cornerstone of the financial world. Some economists and politicians will claim this ain't so, that it's not a zero-sum game and blah blah blah. They're wrong, or more probably lying. The resources of this planet aren't infinite, so yes it is a zero-sum game.

We've been fed years and years of propaganda about how it is important to let investors and entrepreneurs go away with less taxes and less regulations because it's how they "create wealth" -- but you cannot create wealth without creating poverty. We've been told that the proper economic policies was to allow the wealthy to keep their money (rather than redistribute it via taxing and spending) because then it'd "trickle down" in a more efficient way than what the government can do. The result is a widening gap between the richest and the poorest (the rich become richer, the poor become poorer, the middle-class shrinks as they become mostly poor). More importantly, we've ran into a neverending string of financial crises.

Since poor people don't have money, they need credit. This allows fatcat bankers to increase their wealth even more because what the poor believe they own actually belongs to their bankers. But eventually, the scheme breaks down because you cannot get more money from the poor than they had to begin with, you can just sort of make it look like you did, for a while. Then the banks crash, go bankrupt, are bailed out by the state (with taxpayer money), the state gets a massive debt, needs to balance its budget by slashing social services, the poor gets poorer and need credit again, and GOTO 10.

As poverty increases, so does crime. The less scrupulous part of the poor, being denied a honest living, turn to a dishonest one. The lack of quality social services (including education, etc.) destroys the feeling of belonging to a nation, because you can't see your compatriots as your fellows anymore: instead, they are competitors, preys, and threats. The fabric of society is unraveled, people turn back to smaller communities -- clans, gangs, families -- for support and solidarity. Racism and xenophobia increases. Vandalism and aggressions become more common. Those who represent the nation -- like policemen, firemen, etc. -- become the enemy, since they work for something that you no longer acknowledge as being legitimately yours. Next step: civil war.

But hey, the 1% are ready for that. Why do you think there are all these gated communities being created? Why do you think there's so much research & development going into drones -- remote controled robots which will never disobey an order to open fire upon angry civilians?

But no. Welfare and minimum-wage guys are the problem. Taxes are evil. Greed is good.

Bucket said:

Is there a rule somewhere that being proven factually wrong MUST elicit a strawman response?

Not a strawman. You said raising the minimum wage has been proven to have NO effect on employment. You can't also claim that raising the minimum wage to a trillion CAN affect employment. The two statements are logically incompatible. Pick your position.

Do you want to argue facts or semantics? You'll lose both.

Gez, you were correct to say that money printing is zero sum for wealth. It just makes some richer and others poorer.

But you jumped to the conclusion that actual production of goods is also zero sum. That's a bizarre assumption, considering that goods contain actual wealth as opposed to money which is a divisor of wealth.


In other words, while giving everyone a billion dollars obviously wouldn't increase our wealth, I'm pretty sure that "printing" a lifetime supply of food and fuel for everyone, would.

Bucket said:

Do you want to argue facts or semantics? You'll lose both.

Well, the law of averages says you're due for a win. :)

Shall we do both, then?

The federal minimum wage was instated in 1938. Since then, it has been raised 22 times, and multiple studies show that any effect on employment (or the economy at large) has been statistically insignificant. Furthermore, it's been demonstrated that states with a higher-than-federal minimum wage experience better job growth overall.

I feel it's perfectly reasonable and logical, if minimum wage increases HAVEN'T affected unemployment, to assume that they DON'T. Similarly, I can assume that eating bread doesn't cause AIDS because it hasn't.

Unless, of course, you can cite a study that provides new data to be considered. Ideally, I'd like to see a historical precedent of what happens when the minimum wage is set to a trillion dollars (per hour? per year?), since that's the figure you brought forth - and everybody knows AndrewB doesn't just pull figures out of his ass in a laughable attempt to make a substantial argument.

Studies show that neighborhoods with high police presence/patrols are overwhelmingly correlated with high levels of crime.

Therefore, police presence increases crime.

Your move.

That was a poor and lazy attempt to inject causality where it doesn't belong - and curiously, it would be more appropriate to debunk YOUR position than mine - but it turns out that you're factually wrong as well. There is no consistent link between number of police and crime rates, but a more recent study shows it does go down slightly.

http://www.academia.edu/796325/Police_numbers_and_crime_rates_-_a_rapid_evidence_review
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~jmccrary/chalfin_mccrary2012.pdf

Elevated white blood cell counts are highly correlated with infection. Therefore, white blood cells cause infection.

Better?

I'm trying to figure out which side you're batting for here, AndrewB. To adjust the flawed logic you just used to what you said earlier, you end up with this statement: "Minimum wage being raised is highly correlated with unemployment. Therefore, raising minimum wage causes unemployment."

So, are you saying that this is ludicrous and baseless (Protip: It is.) or are you trying to prove that it's true? Because you're doing a great job of the former and a pretty lackluster job of the latter.

AndrewB said:

Elevated white blood cell counts are highly correlated with infection. Therefore, white blood cells cause infection.

Better?

More concise, but still a complete non sequitur, as my stance has NOTHING TO DO WITH CAUSALITY.

But I'll humor you anyway.
"Eating fruit isn't bad for you, in fact it's healthy."
"Eating fruit has no negative effects? Let's force-feed people whole pineapples until their stomachs burst open! Ya-hoooo! Oh wait, that's fatal, so CLEARLY you shouldn't eat fruit. Haw haw, once again my keen insight has won the day."