Fast food workers prepare for another strike for living wages

No, no you’re not, you are worth exactly what someone is willing to pay you for your labor.

Yes, you heard me right, fast food workers across the country are going to be striking today in an apparent attempt to show solidarity in order to force their employers to raise their wages to $15 an hour. They of course want their employers to more than double their hourly pay for the lowest paid, minimum wage jobs, to making what someone at a skilled job does.  They want living wages, without the work requirement. That amount of money would equal over $31,000 a year for a full-time employee, and they want this for entry-level jobs.

Here is the thing, we don’t need fast food that much, it is a luxury item, convenient yes, necessary…not really.  So if the price of the food goes up to meet these people’s salary demands to the point where it is just expensive to eat at a family restaurant, guess where a lot of people will end up instead. I don’t care that the SEIU (Service employees International Union) is helping these poor people strike and paying them for the day, they’re no angels.  Interestingly enough, union wages, which are not considered no or low skilled job positions due to collective bargaining rules, can go back into negotiation every time the minimum wage goes up or the prevailing wages in the work places rise.  So, the SEIU has a vested interest in helping these people blackmail their way into the middle class with none of the work. However, changing those minimums means that the fast food employers will have to raise prices, which means that ripple will go all throughout the economy, into most sectors, and inflation will rise again and then where will this $31,000 job be,  right back near the bottom.

I am not going to apologize for calling fast food employment low skilled labor.  That is what it is, they are entry-level jobs, a place for someone to start into the workplace and learn a few skills, hence the low skilled part, then move on up the chain and find better work.  I wonder if that is why the average McDonald’s worker only stays about 30 days.  These jobs are not meant to provide a family with a living wage.  If your skills, or education, or whatever is so low that the best you can do is a fast foo job, maybe you ought to take stock in your life and dedicate your free time to picking up some marketable skills, or education.  I have an idea for all the fast food employers out there.

I know that these employers don’t exist to provide jobs, they exist to provide a needed, or wanted service.  I think they can have their burger and eat it too.  I’ve seen the touch pads used when ordering food.  Fire the workers in the front, turn the touch pad around so that I can use it to order my meals, it probably can’t get put maybe one or two button pushes simpler, install a cash taking device like the self checkout at the grocery.  That way you can fire all the front staff except the one taking drive through orders.  That should free up six or seven jobs you were paying.  Give the rest of the individuals a fifty cent raise and tell them to work harder than an automated system could, because you’re considering it.

Poorly educated drones, with surly attitudes and poor drive are not worth more than minimum wage.  The bottom of the ladder was never meant to be a place to reside and earn a living wage or raise a family.  these jobs are for part-time workers to have supplemental income.  If they are that hard up, get another job…plenty of people work two jobs to support a family, and maybe then they will understand and appreciate the value of hard labor for a day’s pay, because all they want now is just another hand out.

Fast food joint pays workers $12 an hour, and lives to tell the tale — What a Crock

First of all, it is not a corporate chain responsible to shareholders, it is a single location. Stand alone businesses have lower overhead and also have lower turnover rates than larger corporate companies. Smaller places exist for the pleasure and profit or not of their owners. Corporations are beholden to the people whom fund them, in this case their shareholders where keeping costs down result in more profits. Maybe if the government wasn’t taking over 30% taxes (McDonalds, 32.4% effective tax rate according to ADVFN) they might be able to share a little more wealth.

Fast Food Workers Strike for Outrageous Pay

Fast food workers in New York went on strike yesterday for what they call low wages.  They say they aren’t being paid enough at $7.25 an hour and want an across the board raise that more than doubles their pay to $15 an hour and they want to unionize on top of that as well.  Really. Are you serious?  I see a number of problems with that already and I haven’t even dug into it. But here I go anyway.

Employment in the fast food industry is some of the lowest paid work, because it requires very little in the way of actual skills, cooking with grease and hitting pictures on a cash register doesn’t take exceptional skills.  When labor isn’t all that intensive or skilled it isn’t going to have a large pay attached to it.  In a free market, or at least the quasi-free market we have in the U.S., demand is a function of price.  Higher prices equal lower demand, and that rule applies to prices and wages.  When the wages of low-skill workers go up, jobs are lost.  The lefties and the government sees minimum wage increases as an act of benevolence, but it is not so. Just as demanding a raise can mean the loss of a job.

When the labor completed can be done by more people for less pay it makes sense to hire them, i.e. two employees at $7.25 versus one at $15.  But raise the minimum wage or demand a massive pay increase and the workers price themselves out of a job.  When the wages get too high employers look to technology.  A several thousand dollar cost for a burger making robot, or automated cashier would cost a lot up front but would decrease exponentially as it wouldn’t slack, need breaks, days off, require a shift change, etc. Think about this, when was the last time an usher helped you to your seats in a movie, an elevator operator asked you what floor you would like, a bagger, not a cashier, bagged and took your groceries out to your car.  These low paying jobs were priced right out of the market.

The minimum wage was never meant to be something you could support a family on.  Just like the entry-level, low skilled labor job was not a place that someone was supposed to stay in for life.  But this is why the fast food workers want to marry this massive increase in wages to a union.  A union protects it workers from a minimum wage and keeps other entry-level workers from competing for “union” jobs.  This would thereby protect them from people who would be willing and happy to have a job at minimum wage and keep them from being terminated by management because of the exorbitant cost of employing them. It is a no win situation if the fast food companies cave to this.

Their higher wages would either half the amount of workers in the fast food industry in New York or it would precipitate a massive price increase of the food.  In this economy both of these things are not good for continued economic growth.  A worker complains he can’t make it on min wage, needs support from his relatives and wants to know why he can’t get a job in the white-collar world. The problem isn’t your work ethic, the color or your skin, or your motivation, it is a function of your skills.  The lower your skills, the less you are going to get paid.  Minimum wage is the bottom of the rung, the jobs that used to be for high-school age children but now even they don’t have enough skills for the minimum wage as it is. Their ultimate choices are simple, get more skills and move up, get the wage increases and lose half the jobs, or lose none of the jobs and increase the price of the food, then lose half the jobs or more when no one is buying the high-priced fast food.

Two of those choices are not pretty, but they are realistic.

Source Here.