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Fast food strike

scooter84 said:
I like the technology and the advances and the availability, etc. I don't like the cost - which is heavily impacted by the expense of malpractice insurance, which is heavily impacted by the litigious nature of our country, etc. Unike others here, I am not convinced that healthcare is a right.
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Malpractice insurance is one part. Blaming trial lawyers for high health care costs misses a lot of issues.
 
PhDeac said:
Malpractice insurance is one part. Blaming trial lawyers for high health care costs misses a lot of issues.
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I clearly wasn't trying to list all of the issues related to high health care costs - just one thing that is uniquely a factor in the U.S.

And for all you people saying you have never heard people in Europe or other places complain about their government-run healthcare - I can say that I certainly have heard people complain bitterly about having to wait unreasonable amounts of time for needed tests or treatment - to the detriment of their health.
 
There's this monte way that does a good job of figuring out how much occupations should get paid -- it's how much they get paid.

From my BOY mike munger, former libertarian candidate for nc governor.

 
IAppreciateIt said:
There's this monte way that does a good job of figuring out how much occupations should get paid -- it's how much they get paid.

From my BOY mike munger, former libertarian candidate for nc governor.

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Wouldn't you argue that they are also "being paid" by the government and that should be considered in assessing their total wages, MR. LIBERTARIAN? All I'm advocating is charging the wages to the the appropriate people (the end user of the product) via the operating model vs. me as a taxpayer.
 
i absolutely agree that all of you posters should go on a fast food strike.
 
bmoneydeac said:
Wouldn't you argue that they are also "being paid" by the government and that should be considered in assessing their total wages, MR. LIBERTARIAN? All I'm advocating is charging the wages to the the appropriate people (the end user of the product) via the operating model vs. me as a taxpayer.
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maybe i'm not understanding what you are trying to say, but if we start by mandating all workers should get paid to meet a sufficient lifestyle, i think the likely result would be a massive decrease in cheap food/service options, which would then in turn lead to both an increase in unemployment an in the wages required for the same "sufficient lifestyle", and now we are all much worse off.

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." I'm mostly against anything that reduces competition and pro-consumer sovereignty.
 
I'm arguing that we are collectively already paying minimum wage workers more than minimum wage due to government payments. It would be more efficient (long term) to closer tie those costs to the specific firm than to all taxpayers so the market could decide exactly what these employees are worth based on demand for the goods they help produce. Agree that short-term it would be disastrous to those I'd be trying to help which is why I advocated some sort of phase in of a higher minimum wage. I admit it's all pie-in-the-sky type stuff.

I know that this is also some form of economic engineering that may not work. My ultimate position is that we are wealthy enough of a nation that anyone who works full time (not sure the number but maybe 50 hours/week for minimum wage positions) should make enough money to have reasonable safety and enough to eat. Relying purely on the free market would result in Malthusian type conditions of disease and famine for those on the margin.
 
I will say on the topic of education the startup world is focusing vast resources on changing the landscape of higher education in the United States. There are the big successes like 2tor obviously but a surprising number are focused on community colleges because those schools are teaching skills that are sought after in the job market and the programs are much more affordable. These companies run the gamut from developing "honors" colleges within local CCs to investing in infrastructure builds to capture and distribution of classroom content to remote audiences.

Greater penetration of new technology coupled with the increasingly unstable cost of higher education is driving a real shift in the landscape. The remaining obstacle is that academic institutions are notoriously slow to embrace change and adopt new technology. In many cases, selling into universities involves selling into individual academic departments because there is little uniform rollout across the institution. The sales cycle is also extremely long and budget decisions are typically only made once a year in advance of the start of the academic year to allow for implementation of new software by the time classes start. Then you've got slowly developing trends such a "flipping the classroom" which are accelerating the demand for new technology but directly contradict a system that is hundreds of years old. One can imagine that not all well-established academics are particularly quick to embrace such changes.

All that is to say that the correction in the education landscape is coming but it's really, really hard to make a big dent in the system for a lot of reasons. There has been significant progress in erasing the stigma associated with online education which is absolutely huge and critical to future efforts focused on broadening the reach of quality, affordable education.
 
scooter84 said:
Unike others here, I am not convinced that healthcare is a right.
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I'm going to disagree with you here. It may not be specifically enumerated as a right in our constitution, but it should be a right as a human being. We, as a species, have the capacity to provide healthcare to those in need and should do so.
 
bobknightfan said:
You're damned right, I do! I'd also like for someone to explain to me why a 1-hour hearing test should cost $1,200.
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The real question to me is why the insurance companies agree to pay so much up front. There seems to be some kind of incestuous "you rub my back and I'll rub yours" between the insurance companies, the medical equipment companies, and the medical service providers, but the hell if I can figure out what it is. Seems like the insurance companies would be taking it in the shorts.
 
tsywake said:
$15 an hour for fast food workers? Starting salary for the FDNY is just over $18 an hour. Heck the Winston-Salem fire department starts you out just over $17 an hour.
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I think that's a bit of a straw man. Just for clarification's sake: aren't firefighters municipal workers? It would seem that we're talking about different classifications of labor in that case.

I know administrative assistants who make $80k - what exactly does gross under or over compensation add to this argument?

The fact is that the minimum wage is far too low. Like any good negotiation, you start high.

I worked for a grocery store for two years out of college, one that offered me a $11/hr starting salary, along with quarterly raises of up to $1/hour, and the option to buy in to what is still the best health insurance of my life. After two years, I was making $16/hour with full benefits and to this day, I have never had a job that has compensated me that well. Granted, I'm a graduate student and will be for some time, but I wasn't then. During that time, I also held the title of Program Assistant at two non profits, and was compensated less and without benefits. Living in New York at the time, I paid $700/mo. in rent (which is actually really cheap), ~$100/mo. in transportation, and ~$50 in utilities.

In a lot of ways, I was lucky. I have a college education from an elite school and likely was started a dollar higher than most workers at my store as a result. Furthermore, being white and educated in a workplace that privileged this, likely allowed me to make max quarterly raises versus a lot of my lower income peers.

All workers are underpaid, but low wage workers lack both opportunities for upward mobility and often are positionally stuck in minimum wage jobs with added financial burdens. A poster wrote about working in the Banana Republic, but both that poster and myself had greater opportunities to fall back on. We moved on. Most low wage workers don't have these opportunities.

Perhaps a $15/hr. minimum wage is problematic, but it's a start of a conversation that desperately needs to be had, especially considering the divergent trajectories experienced by low wage workers in this country. Making $15/hr for the rest of your life certainly changes the terms of this conversation, IMO. If anything, then it helps poor people stay a bit better off in an increasingly bleak economy.

And fuck bootstraps.
 
When I was in graduate school, I made about 1400 a month between my various jobs. The only time I couldn't pay my bills was over the summer when I didn't have my TA job.

Someone working 40 hours a week at 8.15 per hour makes more than I did and still had enough money to buy comic books and go out to eat occasionally.

I likely would not have been able to afford an iPhone or a flat screen but that was OK. I had basic cable and internet, plus a decent apartment.

Granted, this was in Winston where cost of living is pretty low so I could see how it would be a problem in say NYC.

However, $15 per hour is ridiculous.
 
lokisapocalypse said:
When I was in graduate school, I made about 1400 a month between my various jobs. The only time I couldn't pay my bills was over the summer when I didn't have my TA job.

Someone working 40 hours a week at 8.15 per hour makes more than I did and still had enough money to buy comic books and go out to eat occasionally.

I likely would not have been able to afford an iPhone or a flat screen but that was OK. I had basic cable and internet, plus a decent apartment.

Granted, this was in Winston where cost of living is pretty low so I could see how it would be a problem in say NYC.

However, $15 per hour is ridiculous.
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Were you single at the time, or did you have dependents? (I am single for tax purposes.) Additionally, you'd have to factor in cost of living (though you alluded to living in Winston) because we're talking about a minimum wage that holds for places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenwich, as well as Winston-Salem, Jacksonville, Tulsa, Fargo, and Roswell.

I understand your point, and in the case of graduate students largely agree, but my point is that there are other structural and environmental conditions that make a substantial increase necessary. That's the point that I think has gone somewhat unsaid on this thread, IMO.
 
You can't compare the case of a college graduate sacrificing wages for future gains by going to grad school to someone supporting a family on minimum wages.
 
PhDeac said:
You can't compare the case of a college graduate sacrificing wages for future gains by going to grad school to someone supporting a family on minimum wages.
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Well, they should've thought of that before they had kids. Those kids have bootstraps, don't they?
 
PhDeac said:
You can't compare the case of a college graduate sacrificing wages for future gains by going to grad school to someone supporting a family on minimum wages.
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pretty similar as both could be viewed as temporary employment.
 
tsywake said:
$15 an hour for fast food workers? Starting salary for the FDNY is just over $18 an hour. Heck the Winston-Salem fire department starts you out just over $17 an hour.
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First year salary for FDNY is $39,370 with "fringe" bumping up to $43,074. After 5 years that bumps up to $76,488 and with fringe(OT) up to $99,104.

Not sure that's really comparable....
 
there is no way fast food workers should earn $15, that's absurd. it is a job that requires no education, hell you barely need to know how to read or count. i can think of a lot of other jobs that deserve a raise first...never met a fast food worker that gave a damn.
 
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