"Thousands" of min-wage McDonalds workers to walk off jobs to demand better pay

[DisgruntledVirus]

Sorry but no way should minimum wage go to $15/hr.

My job through college was working in a call center for $13/hr, which most people there only had HS degrees, while living on my own/with roommates. About 6 months before graduation with my 4 year degree (which I'm paying for myself, parents/family didn't pay for it like people in this thread claim) I got a job in my career field making $19.50/hr. Now I'm significantly higher than that, but there is no way that minimum wage should be $15/hr.

A raise to $8.50, perhaps could be justified. But there are plenty of options available for people if they work for it. Many of them could find call center jobs for $13/hr or more with just applying at these places and current credentials...

 

[gothamhunter]

Screw that; they'd be making more than most of the people I know with 4 year degrees. Hell they'd make more than half of the educators in our country.

 

[postmortemIA]

If government subsidy goes away, problem would fix itself - workers would improve their skills so they earn enough for living, and Walmart would pay livable wage for rest.

 

[Ruptga]

You really think so in this country? I think what will happen is people are not just going to sit idle and starve to death.

Look what happened to Nikolay Alexandrovich Romanov and the turmoil that ensued. Many empires/forms of government have fallen when you have a shit load of hungry pissed off people.

It takes some time for people to get truly desperate enough, and for order to degrade enough for a revolt to be possible. It would absolutely happen though, eventually.

I say cut all taxpayer subsides to fast food workers. Let the natural market do its work. I guarantee you are not going to see people just sitting idle and waiting to die quietly of starvation.


The natural unsubsidized wages will prevail and it will be higher than todays minimum wage if you cut all the lemon socialist programs.

That is a seriously terrible idea, with that drastic of a change there would be medieval-level chaos for generations. Natural selection, whether in genetics or the markets, is a tinkerer and it takes its damn time. I want results in my lifetime. Also, evolutionary results are stable, but they're also not fully optimized. If eyes were designed from the ground up it would be impossible for retinas to detach, for example. The same sort of things happen in markets left to their own devices.

Those policies are not setup to protect the middle class.
They are setup to support the lower class and generate warm fuzzies for the liberals

Middle class is not considered to be eligible for food stamps; subsidized housing, Medicaid, etc. All of those require a means test; that test is not looking at just income projected; but income past and assets.

A middle class has to unload their assets and/or falsify info to be able gain access to such benefits. Or wait until they are broken down and are actually lower class.

Those policies keep people from sliding down to the bottom class during hard times, and they help more people move into the middle class during decent times.

Plus, there are all kinds of tax breaks (for home mortgages, etc) that are specifically designed and marketed as being for the primary benefit of the middle class, those are also social welfare policies.

 

[waitman]

90% of the time, those dumb asses can't even get a simple order right. They look confused when I check my order completely before leaving the drive through window. They always hand me drinks with liquid all over the outside, give no napkins and it gets all over my vehicle or me. They don't deserve minimum wage let alone $15 an hour for being brain dead cretins.

 

[BlahBlahYouToo]

What these fools here don't realize is how thin the line is between "skilled worker" and mcdonalds employee. Say they outsourced your job to India and your "skill" becomes obsolete in a moments notice. But you're 40 years old and haven't done anything but that specific skill. Or you get into a wreck in your car and suffer some mental damage and can't do the work you use to do. Now you're the guy behind the counter that is looked down upon by these holier than thou computer techs.
Yeah I agree these guys don't deserve 50 grand a year. Not even saying they should get 30k. They should at least get enough they can have an apartment, a car, pay for their own food etc..

you're paid what you're worth.
not what YOU think people should be able to afford.

 

[BlahBlahYouToo]

You've obviously never worked fast food if you think it's a minimum wage job. It's fast paced and constant hard work. It's definitely worth more than $7 a hour.

if it's worth more than $7 an hour, they'd be paid more than $7 an hour without having to strike.

 

[Kaido]

you're paid what your employers think you're worth.

ftfy

 

[BlahBlahYouToo]

Part of the problem is that not everyone is intellectually gifted enough to get a job in something other than fast-food or retail work. I doubt there are many people who want to work at Walmart or McDonalds as adults, but people have bills to pay and you have to get by. I've had to work at Pizza Hut & Staples to make ends meet in the past. It stunk and it definitely motivated me to go to college, but not everyone gets that opportunity or has the ability to do that.

So this raises the question, should people who don't have the ability to do better than a minimum-wage job be stuck in poverty? To me, this epitomizes the "Occupy Wallstreet" movement, i.e. the 1% vs. the 99%. I have zero problem with people making millions or billions of dollars in our capitalistic society; if you want to get out there, work 100 hours a week, and make bank, then more power to you. But if you're doing it on the heads of what equates to modern-day slaves, then shame on you. $4,200 an hour vs. $8.25 an hour for the president of the company vs. the guy who actually does the work is ridiculous. Pardon the (extreme) language, but Louis CK pretty much nailed it in this bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVTXFsHYLKA

Yes, I know there are politics involved, Republicans vs. Democrats, helping the needy vs. being self-sufficient, but the nature of reality is that there will always be people stuck in crappy situations who need help. I think it's pretty shallow to let people under your management who, in truth, make it possible for you to live so well as a company owner or manager, suffer with a crappy paycheck. Life isn't about money, but money is important because it's the grease that makes people's day-to-day lives flow - where you live, what car you drive or if you even have a car, what clothes you wear - all determined by your access to money, i.e., your paycheck.

It boggles my mind that people can be so cold-hearted about it in business. Especially in the restaurant business. I currently work roughly 70 hours a week in IT. Yes, it's stressful. Yes, it's a lot of hours. Yes, I'm on-call 24/7, get yelled out for computer problems, and have a receding hairline to show for it. But it's nothing compared to when I worked in fast food. I got crap pay for one of the most difficult & demanding jobs I've ever had in my life. But the people who get paid are the people who make the game, not the so-called pawns of the game. As they said in Ocean's 11, the house always wins. Managers run the show, so they are the winners financially.

Stinks. That's our society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

 

[Gunslinger08]

They are paid what the market will bear. Basic economics applies to human capital as much as anything else in the free market. Demand for no-skill labor is pretty constant, but has probably gone up some in the past 5 years due to the bad economy - more people are spending money at low priced restaurants/stores. The supply of people willing to work anywhere (and therefore work at no-skill jobs) is pretty high. This means wages aren't going to go up. This leads you, as a no-skill laborer, to two paths:

1. Gain a skill that has a better supply deficit.
2. Force someone else to artificially increase your wages.

I absolutely disagree with #2. The only place "someone else" (the government) has in this situation is ensuring that collusion to reduce/maintain worker salaries doesn't take place.

The emotional response is always that nobody can live off of $x/hr. The logical responses are:
1. Maybe your goal shouldn't be to live off what you can get now. Maybe your goal should be to improve your life through education and hard work.
2. A large majority of minimum wage workers aren't in low income families. This means that a lot of them are either dependents or second job takers.
3. It's considerably cheaper for the economy as a whole to just give these give low income families tax credits.
4. In general, it is not the responsibility of your employer, your neighbors, or your government to take care of you. Human charity is a great thing, but should not be forced.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Everyone talks about the market as if it was simply a quantitative function of supply and demand. That's a gross oversimplification that totally ignores other factors that often play a greater role in setting prices and wages. Culture both public and private, skill sets of available workers, corporate trends, new or recently unregulated financial instruments and many other factors often have greater impact on the "bottom line " than supply and demand.

 

[Ichinisan]

Not necessarily. The cost of the product is based around what people are willing to pay. If you decrease your production costs, that doesn't mean that people's willingness to pay a certain price diminishes, and there's no incentive for a corporation to sell a product for less than the market deems it is worth. More often than not, lower production costs aren't realized as lower product costs, they're realized as higher profits.

I guarantee dropping from $7.25/hour to $3/hour will affect what minimum-wage earners are willing to pay for many things. For example, lots of minimum wage workers smoke cigarettes...do you think they would be willing to keep buying cigarettes at the same prices they were paying before? Do you think they'll keep paying for cable TV with extra channels at the same price as before? When producers and service providers see these sales numbers falling, they would respond with lower prices.

 

[Ruptga]

I guarantee dropping from $7.25/hour to $3/hour will affect what minimum-wage earners are willing to pay for many things. For example, lots of minimum wage workers smoke cigarettes...do you think they would be willing to keep buying cigarettes at the same prices they were paying before? Do you think they'll keep paying for cable TV with extra channels at the same price as before? When producers and service providers see these sales numbers falling, they would respond with lower prices.

$10/hour is a living wage (for most of the country). Those who earn less than $10/hour make up the difference with government assistance, working 60 hours per week, living in the projects/ghetto with roommates, etc. A person in the US that could only get a $3/hour job would either die or be involved in an extralegal and/or illegal economy, their contribution to the regular economy would be completely negligible.

/buzzkillington

 

[CZroe]

Everyone talks about the market as if it was simply a quantitative function of supply and demand. That's a gross oversimplification that totally ignores other factors that often play a greater role in setting prices and wages. Culture both public and private, skill sets of available workers, corporate trends, new or recently unregulated financial instruments and many other factors often have greater impact on the "bottom line " than supply and demand.

The only reason it's so complex is all the misguided meddling that's already been done.

 

[BoberFett]

you're paid what you're worth.
not what YOU think people should be able to afford.

Almost. You're paid what the job is worth. If a person isn't being paid what they feel they're worth, they need to find a new job. That's true of anybody in any field at any salary.

 

[mikeford]

All minimum wage laws do in practice is limit who can get a job, they don't increase the pay of low skill workers, they remove them from the workforce.

Think about why one segment of politics would like to make people lose their jobs.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

The only reason it's so complex is all the misguided meddling that's already been done.

BS, it's just a great way to lie for politicians and corporate management. You can see it yourself in your daily life. Track prices at your local supermarket. Pricing now has little to do with purchase price and cost of warehousing /transportation and everything to do with customer buying habits. A few more months and I truly expect to see prices rise on the weekends. They just haven't figured out how to sell it yet.

 

[CZroe]

$10/hour is a living wage (for most of the country). Those who earn less than $10/hour make up the difference with government assistance, working 60 hours per week, living in the projects/ghetto with roommates, etc. A person in the US that could only get a $3/hour job would either die or be involved in an extralegal and/or illegal economy, their contribution to the regular economy would be completely negligible.

/buzzkillington

So, a highschooler working an afterschool job must be selling dope because $3 an hour is not enough to live on? What about all the kids who don't have afterschool jobs? I thought it was perfectly normal.

$3 is a deliberate exaggeration, of course, but the fact is that few offering minimum wage today would be able to get away with offering only $3 an hour even if the minimum were dropped that low because they wouldn't have any employees and they'd go out of business.

Free market goes both ways. If you aren't able to get by on that wage: don't. Pass for something better.

It's a fallacy I keep seeing repeated that unskilled labor can only work minimum wage fast food and retail jobs. Once you stop lying to yourself you see that there are many manual labor and undesireable positions that pay more for unskilled labor. It's harder and it pays more because that's what someone willing to do it is worth.

 

[ponyo]

Going rate for day laborer is $10 an hour.

 

[CZroe]

BS, it's just a great way to lie for politicians and corporate management. You can see it yourself in your daily life. Track prices at your local supermarket. Pricing now has little to do with purchase price and cost of warehousing /transportation and everything to do with customer buying habits. A few more months and I truly expect to see prices rise on the weekends. They just haven't figured out how to sell it yet.

Keep lying to yourself. Customer buying habits are signals of demand and the price is set accordingly. A bigger signal is being unable or unwilling to purchase your goods due to price. They only charge what we, the market, allows them to get away with.

There is more demand on weekends so raising and lowering prices based on the day of the week fits my argument and not yours.

 

[CZroe]

Going rate for day laborer is $10 an hour.

Which is not minimum wage and not the only option either.

 

[nehalem256]

$10/hour is a living wage (for most of the country). Those who earn less than $10/hour make up the difference with government assistance, working 60 hours per week, living in the projects/ghetto with roommates, etc. A person in the US that could only get a $3/hour job would either die or be involved in an extralegal and/or illegal economy, their contribution to the regular economy would be completely negligible.

/buzzkillington

$10 is an hour is a living wage FOR A SINGLE PERSON. Unfortunately a living wage for a single mom with just one kid is more like $20/hr*. And of course liberals think minimum wage jobs should be able to support such people.

*Disturbing a living wage for a married couple with 2 kids is actually slightly less than for a single mom with one kid.

Source: http://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/27053

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Keep lying to yourself. Customer buying habits are signals of demand and the price is set accordingly. A bigger signal is being unable or unwilling to purchase your goods due to price. They only charge what we, the market, allows them to get away with.

There is more demand on weekends so raising and lowering prices based on the day of the week fits my argument and not yours.

You've got it backwards. The favorite refrain of supermarkets is "we only stock what customers demand." The reality is grocers stock the products that offer the best rebates /incentives and customers "demand " what's offered them. There is no "free market " because there is no alternative when all sellers play the same game.

 

[ponyo]

Which is not minimum wage and not the only option either.

Trust me, I want to pay them less. Most won't work for less though. Especially during the peak summer.

 

[Ichinisan]

$10/hour is a living wage (for most of the country). Those who earn less than $10/hour make up the difference with government assistance, working 60 hours per week, living in the projects/ghetto with roommates, etc. A person in the US that could only get a $3/hour job would either die or be involved in an extralegal and/or illegal economy, their contribution to the regular economy would be completely negligible.

/buzzkillington

If costs of goods and services went down as a result of the public having less spending power, $3 might not seem as bad as you imply. I'm talking deflation here.