The Fast Food Forward Movement

[awesome possum]

It will never work, to pay employees $15 an hour, the fast food chains would have to jack up prices on the consumer end.

There was a study done last week or the week before that showed if McDonalds raised their minimum wage to $15 per hour and pushed the cost directly onto the menu, customers would be paying $0.68 more per Big Mac.

There was a similar one for Walmart. If they raised their minimum wage to $12 per hour and pushed the cost directly onto their product, customers on average would pay $0.46 more per trip.

THE HORROR!

.Dude, they just raised it to $7.25 a hour in 2009. I think you are misinformed on this issue.

Another study done recently: pegged for inflation today's minimum wage workers actually make less than the minimum wage workers of the late 60s.

>The minimum wage of $1.60 an hour in 1968 would be $10.56 today when adjusted for inflation

There's a bit of misinformation going around here, but you appear to be the source of it.

edit to add links as some might not take my memory as gospel

[Frog Eater]

Unskilled fast food workers deserve unskilled fast food worker pay. minimum wage. As was said above, if you increase wages to the point where its cheaper to automate them, then pretty soon Mcdonalds will just be a robotic place you pull up to in your car, place your order and out the shoot comes your quarter pounder with cheese, perfectly cooked fries, and soft drink.

[Spring Bass]

I'd be in favor of raising the minimum wage, although raising it to $15 seems rather drastic (and forget about doing that just at McDonald's, the main target of the protests - they'd lose business quickly to other fast food places). I'd settle to raising it to $10/hr, though, which is close to what it was in 2012 dollars at its peak in the late 1960s. That's also about where it is in certain cities (San Francisco), and not much more than what it is in Washington - neither of which are suffering employment issues as a result of that. If you wanted to boost teenage employment, you could also graduate the minimum wage on an age basis, like with Australia (the regular minimum wage is something like the US equivalent of $15-16/hr, but teenagers have a lower one).

It's not the most efficient way to boost incomes at the bottom, which would be to do a bigger Earned Income Tax Credit that's applicable to all low-income workers (or even a guaranteed income/negative income tax). But this country seems firmly wedded to the whole "redistribute the corporatist way", so it's what we've got.

Unskilled fast food workers deserve unskilled fast food worker pay. minimum wage. As was said above, if you increase wages to the point where its cheaper to automate them, then pretty soon Mcdonalds will just be a robotic place you pull up to in your car, place your order and out the shoot comes your quarter pounder with cheese, perfectly cooked fries, and soft drink.

We crossed that bridge a long time ago. I'd rather just take the hit and get greater automation than have a ton of below-subsistence wage jobs that we then have to subsidize anyways through welfare spending, particularly if it ends up pushing people to upgrade their skills and education.

There was a study done last week or the week before that showed if McDonalds raised their minimum wage to $15 per hour and pushed the cost directly onto the menu, customers would be paying $0.68 more per Big Mac.

There are some issues with that study.

[DaarioKnowsBest]

Oh so you aren't against raising minimum wage, just against drastically raising it all at once?

I think we are in agreement here.

I'm pretty sure they are just doing basic negotiation. You always ask for more than what you think you can realistically get. They are asking for 15 knowing they have a shot at getting 10 or so.

I'd like minimum wage to be 15-20$, I'm not saying do it overnight with one law. And eventually get to a point where minimum wage stays rising at a rate where people can survive on it. In the 80s and 90s it didn't change at all. It always needs to slightly increase with the rest of society. But it stayed so stagnant that's it not enough to live on now

And I'm also not buying this don't do it or else robots will take the jobs, that's going to happen and IS happening. And the preciously skilled factory worker will be replaced by a robot as well, minimum wage will not effect this change

[awesome possum]

Unskilled fast food workers deserve unskilled fast food worker pay. minimum wage.

This is so brain-numbingly fucking stupid that I decided that instead of trying to say "brain-numbingly fucking stupid" in a nice way I would just say brain-numbingly fucking stupid for the assumption that if you work fast food you're automatically an unskilled worker.

[thecryptile]

There's a bit of misinformation going around here, but you appear to be the source of it.

First, 68 cents is a huge increase. About 1/4 more than the current price. Second, these studies were done only in the context of one chain of stores raising wages, not the entire country.

What about wage pressure for people who currently make more than minimum wage? Do you think that someone who currently makes $15 would be content with making minimum wage? I don't. They would demand proportionate raises.

[Former Lord of Winterfell]

Oh so you aren't against raising minimum wage, just against drastically raising it all at once?

I think we are in agreement here.

I'm pretty sure they are just doing basic negotiation. You always ask for more than what you think you can realistically get. They are asking for 15 knowing they have a shot at getting 10 or so.

I'd like minimum wage to be 15-20$, I'm not saying do it overnight with one law. And eventually get to a point where minimum wage stays rising at a rate where people can survive on it. In the 80s and 90s it didn't change at all. It always needs to slightly increase with the rest of society. But it stayed so stagnant that's it not enough to live on now

But....not every job is going to be worth enough that you can survive on that wage. That's the point you seem to be missing. There are always going to be some jobs, and some people, whose labor just isn't worth very much. So maybe it's the type of job you have as a kid, or a young person just looking to get some supplemental money for college, or an older person looking for some extra money to supplement retirement. maybe it takes two people working one of those jobs, and sharing expenses. Maybe it is someone who is mentally disabled, and can't do a sophisticated job, but can do something less. And maybe people would rather do without whatever good/service that person is capable of producing rather than paying too much for it.

I'll give you an example. There are a lot of people in parts of the country who hired part-time house cleaners. Those people often are immigrants who can't speak the language and have no other job skills. One thing they can do is house cleaning, because you don't really need any communication skills. But those jobs don't pay very much. If you say "we're going to jack up the wages", the response is going to be "well, if it's that much, I guess we'll just clean it ourselves." You help no-one by doing that.

[Shryke]

As AP has already pointed out, Minimum Wage has been HIGHER in the past.

Real Minimum Wage has been steadily decreasing for awhile:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42973.pdf

(technically it's been going steadily down with occasional upward jumps)

[Spring Bass]

That seems likely, although it depends on how much leverage they've got in negotiations with their employer (meaning how much the employer can afford to lose them).

It would be interesting as an experiment. Having a $15/min wage doesn't seem to produce high overall unemployment rates by itself, since Australia has both that level of minimum wage and low unemployment. But would an increase lead to an actual improvement in worker living standards, or would it just get eaten up in a rise in overall living costs? I tend to think it would improve worker living standards, simply because so much of their income is going towards housing, gas, and food - and only food would be directly negatively effected. But in any case, that's why a negative income tax/higher EITC/guaranteed income would be better.

RE: Former Lord of Winterfell

If McDonald's was strictly partitioning the minimum wage line workers into part-time work, I'd be in agreement. But they seem to be willing to have full-time employees working at that wage level, and for better or for worse, a full-time job is generally expected to be one that you could make a living off of (within reasonable expectations - jobs that you could live off of full-time as an individual might not support a family of four).

[awesome possum]

What about wage pressure for people who currently make more than minimum wage? Do you think that someone who currently makes $15 would be content with making minimum wage? I don't. They would demand proportionate raises.

And they would deserve it. Corporate profits have been at all time highs almost every financial quarter since our tax dollars were used to bail out all those big banks. Meanwhile the middle class sinks lower and lower and the poor, well, they're screwed ever more.

I don't think anything will be done about it, because those corporations own all of our politicians. But a corporation that sees $6 billion profits this year won't be hurt in the least fucking bit by only making $1 billion profits.

[Shryke]

First, 68 cents is a huge increase. About 1/4 more than the current price. Second, these studies were done only in the context of one chain of stores raising wages, not the entire country.

What about wage pressure for people who currently make more than minimum wage? Do you think that someone who currently makes $15 would be content with making minimum wage? I don't. They would demand proportionate raises.

You need a sense of the scale of the impact here:

Past research on how business costs rise with minimum wage hikes indicates that a 10-percent minimum wage hike can be expected to produce a cost increase for the average business of less than one-tenth of one percent of their sales revenue. This cost figure includes three components. First, mandated raises: the raises employers must give their workers to meet the new wage floor. Second, “ripple-effect” raises: the raises employers give some workers to put their pay rates a bit above the new minimum in order to preserve the same wage hierarchy before and after minimum wage hike. And third, the higher payroll taxes employers must pay on their now-larger wage bill. If the average businesses wanted to completely cover the cost increase from a 10-percent minimum wage hike through higher prices, they would need to raise their prices by less than 0.1 percent.[1]A price increase of this size amounts to marking up a $100 price tag to $100.10.

The bottom line: these minimum wage hikes pose no inflationary threat. The potential contribution of the minimum wage COLAs to inflation would be to raise the rate of inflation by less than 0.1 percent. This would raise, for example, the average annual inflation rate of 2.6 percent to 2.7 percent—a change so small that the rate is effectively unchanged in any meaningful way. In fact, this potential impact on inflation is smaller than the margin of error for the Department of Labor’s estimate of inflation.[5]

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14050-minimum-wage-hikes-do-not-cause-inflation#_ftn1

[Shryke]

Also, the other popular myth that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment has been most thoroughly studied and shown to be incorrect.

[TheLoneliestMonk]

FLOW,

I call bullshit on your house cleaner example. Seriously, it takes like 3 hours to clean a 2 br house, and you're saying people pay significantly less than 45$ (that's 3 hrs at 15/hr for those counting along)? Wtf?

[Isalie]

I may be callous.

But a skilled cook out of culinary school who has anywhere from $30-90k in debt makes around $15 per hour. The person at burger king does not deserve this wage

That said I hope they get it. I hope it cuts deep into the pockets of these companies that peddle swill.

This only means that the skilled cooks are way underpayed...

[thecryptile]

Also, the other popular myth that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment has been most thoroughly studied and shown to be incorrect.

Source?

[awesome possum]

This only means that the skilled cooks are way underpayed...

This is very true. My wife is friends with a lady who met her husband at a culinary school. They both graduated with flying colors, both have jobs specifically in their industry (she works at a small bake shop, he's the house chef for an IU fraternity). They are currently struggling to put food on their table because she makes next to nothing and he's been laid off during the summer.

[Fragile Bird]

All the bullshit arguments that are used to fight increases in minimum wages are being trotted out here. For crying out loud, have the minimum wage at least keep up with inflation.

I am willing to bet none of the people fighting against a decent minimum wage in this thread are either majority shareholders of McDonalds or 1%ers (are you, FLoW? or thecryptile?) Henry Ford certainly recognized workers had to be paid a decent wage in order to go out and spend money.

Source?

You have a bloody nerve asking for sources when you haven't provided a single one for any of your arguments. Quoting bullshit articles that say the best way to protect workers is to take away all protection workers have is not quoting a source. Try backing up all the wild statements you've made in this thread with facts and figures.

[Shryke]

Source?

Here to start:

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/min-wage-2013-02.pdf

It's a very well studied subject. Basically anything that involves actual studies finds the same thing.

[emberling]

Or get another job, or start their own business. Unfortunately, both of these things are much harder than they need to be due to burdensome regulations.

:lmao: Yeah, it's burdensome regulations that stop minimum-wage workers from starting their own businesses. If not for those damn regulations, everyone would be bootstrapping themselves! Using all that starting capital that they don't have.

I keep seeing this line of reasoning from the right - if they would just be better workers they'd get promoted! If they'd just channel the entrepreneurial American spirit they'd be their own boss and not have to worry about being underpaid! But each promoted manager needs peons to manage. For each successful new small business, there are countless failures. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps is a fine rhetoric for advising a single person but it is constantly presented as if it is helping society, as if it's an answer to the problem that some people just aren't getting by. But it's inherent in the philosophy that some people don't get by, that some people take risks and lose big.

If you think it's okay that some people starve, please have the guts to say so instead of hiding behind the idea that each individual starving person could, maybe, not be starving if they made different choices (no matter that if they did, some other person would likely be starving instead).

[Frog Eater]

This is so brain-numbingly fucking stupid that I decided that instead of trying to say "brain-numbingly fucking stupid" in a nice way I would just say brain-numbingly fucking stupid for the assumption that if you work fast food you're automatically an unskilled worker.

for your brain numbingly fucking stupid post I give you the definition of unskilled labor:

unskilled labor

noun

1.

work that requires practically no training or experience for its adequate or competent performance. The very definition of fast food workers!