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Fast food strike

davejuice said:
pretty similar as both could be viewed as temporary employment.
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Except fast food isn't temporary for a lot of people among a ton of other differences.
 
warak said:
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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Fast food workers make up close to 10% of the US work force. Fuck 'em.
 
bobknightfan said:
They're part of that 47% of the American people whom it's not our job to worry about.

(And I'm still waiting for someone from our "World's Best Healthcare System" to explain why a 1-hour hearing test should cost $1,200.)
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maybe you can explain how to provide the test for less
 
I told you why, you just didn't hear it. You need another test.
 
this issue is very complicated and troubling. It is rife with unintended consequences. If you mandate a very high minimum wage, employers are going to act rationally by eliminating positions that do not provide $15/hour value to the organization. You will accelerate robotics and automation taking the place of low-skilled work. A screen at Sheetz can already do everything a cashier at McDonald's can do. How hard do you think it would be to design a McDonald's with a system that automatically empties the trash, or design a machine that can handle the fry-cooking as well as a human? I suspect not that hard, and if you raise the minimum wage enough, McDonald's will have an incentive to figure it out.

These very low-skill, low-pay jobs suck in a lot of ways, but they also provide a valuable function in society, namely, teaching people how to work - how to show up on time, follow instructions, pass drug tests, interact with supervisors and difficult customers, etc. It is not good for our society to have these jobs eliminated and replaced by screens and machines.

Some people never progress beyond these entry level jobs. The question is, who should bear the burden of making sure those people have a minimum standard of living? Should all the burden be on their employers, or should it be spread around to society as a whole? Right now it's split - minimum wage laws plus food stamps and other public support.

The existing, very low minimum wage has already contributed to the elimination of a lot of low-marginal-value jobs - when was the last time a guy cleaned your windshield and checked your oil at a gas station? What happened to elevator attendants in hotels? The list goes on. These jobs just did not add value to the employer equal to the cost of employing the person at the government-mandated level. I would be very careful about increasing it more. Instead I would like to see a better-designed social safety net to help the inevitable losers in the capitalist game. I am starting to conclude that the best thing we could do would be to scrap the entire poverty-industrial complex of government bureaucracies monitoring compliance programs for poor people, and just give the poor no-strings-attached cash to bring them up to a decent standard of living while they try to advance beyond McJobs.
 
EatLeadCommie said:
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.
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The more tests and procedures cost. the more insurance companies can charge in premiums. They have no incentive in keeping costs as low as they could get them.
 
The "poverty-industrial complex" is good.
 
I guess my point is that you and everyone else bitches about what something costs, but no one ever explains why they're bitching. It's my favorite dumb consumer complaint. How do you know what something should cost? I can complain about my mechanic charging me to fix my brakes because I know how much time/effort it requires and what the parts cost. All we can do is assume $1200 is a ripoff for an hour long test.
 
why does everyone assume that this hike to 16 dollars/hr or whatever would take place all at once? we can get their wages up to that level over the course of a decade and it wouldn't be that noticeable (of course by then it'd be closer to 20 dollars but u get the idea).

isn't it sort of implied that an adult working a full time job should be paid a wage that can realistically be lived off of? The notion that you should be paid a salary that many proponents of openly admit cannot actually be lived off simply due to the market is saddening (and this appears to be the majority position on this board and in the nation..coming from people who make more than that and have never worked a day in a fast food restaurant no less). if we're gonna ignore the societal impact of forcing a significant segment of people into working poor, then why not just abolish the entire notion of minimum wage?

i think as developed nations develop more, the idea of paying people fairly for the work they do will be more commonplace (this means reducing pay on the other end of the spectrum as well--i'm fucking sick of 3% of the global population controlling 90% of the worlds economic pie while the bottom quarter or more are literally dying of starvation...it's absurd. as much as you all hate on bkf i do not understand how people cannot agree with the essence of his arguments on this, just from a commonsense, humanistic perspective). btw, i have never seen a mcd employee just standing around. not ever. and they sure don't have time to go check espn and post on a message board during the work day. the truth is they work hard as hell..and you really can't dispute that.

oh and the budgets proposed by conservatives on this issue are just silly. they assume your car will never break, ur GF will never accidentally get pregnant, and you won't ever need to take off work cuz you get the flu. just silly budgets coming from old men who somehow have failed to appreciate the complexity and unpredictability of life despite having lived it for so long.
 
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RJKarl said:
The more tests and procedures cost. the more insurance companies can charge in premiums. They have no incentive in keeping costs as low as they could get them.
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I understand some things being expensive because docs invest in expensive machines, etc... But what I'm talking about is a CPAP machine that can be had for $500 that a medical supply company charges $5000 for and basically marks up everything associated with it anywhere from 5 to 10 times what you can buy it for otherwise. Now assuming you have a $500 deductible, why would the insurance company pay $4500 for a $500 CPAP machine?
 
bmoneydeac said:
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.
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Maybe I'm still misunderstanding, but I do think your first statement is totes wrong. TOTES. I mean, that is exactly what a minimum wage does (shift burden from public to private) in our society, which I think is horrible. It doesn't let the market decide because any workers worth under the minimum wage would either be unemployed or overpaid, which is the very issue with the minimum wage itself.

So anyway, let's say that a person needs $150/day to live at what we deem "comfortable" living. The market decides that they are only worth $10/hour, and even at 12 hours a day leaves them $30 short. (all these numbers are purely illustrative). So now we've got a dude who's living $30 short. Operating completely all else equal (no change in the 'size of the pie' due to changed incentives, no increased unemployment, etc.) let's compare two options:

(1) get him the $30 through some sort of welfare-type government program
(2) force his employer to pay him $12.5/hour

Now (again, looking at it from a very narrow focus), the first option would allow us to provide the necessary help to the person through funds gathered through progressive income tax, capital gains, excise taxes, tariffs, etc -- places where society loses the least value from being taxed, all else equal.

On the other hand, the second option would have way more direct negative consequences -- low-wage workers are often the key to providing low-cost goods and services -- the ones often consumed by low-income people. And the natural response of higher expenses would be higher costs of those goods and services. So essentially, a portion of a higher minimum wage will be borne by low-income people, even if we ensure no loss in employment (which would be impossible). So even at its best, the increased minimum wage is pretty much a regressive tax.

So basically I pretty much hate your post and disagree with all of it. or I'm not understanding your point.
 
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i think something is getting lost here...this is a job that can be filled by just about anyone that can work. it is simply supply and demand...as long as there are people waiting to take the place of bad workers they will be replaced. it is capitalism! there is a minimum wadge and they have every right keep the wadge at the minimum and have no reason to do otherwise.

i am not saying they shouldn't raise the price or give some sort of incentive to people that are 'lifers' or good workers, but i think it is fucked that they would have to double their payroll. oh, dmcheatw and when i go to FF (rarely), there are more times than not workers standing around and i get poor service. just my experience and why i rarely go to FF...could be simply the location or FF company.
 
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dmcheatw said:
isn't it sort of implied that an adult working a full time job should be paid a wage that can realistically be lived off of? The notion that you should be paid a salary that many proponents of openly admit cannot actually be lived off simply due to the market is saddening (and this appears to be the majority position on this board and in the nation..coming from people who make more than that and have never worked a day in a fast food restaurant no less). if we're gonna ignore the societal impact of forcing a significant segment of people into working poor, then why not just abolish the entire notion of minimum wage?
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Just responding to this part of your post. Part of your argument works, part of it I think leaves out or ignores some important issues. A big part of the issue here is that what most Americans consider an acceptable standard of living (especially in high-cost-of-living areas) is fairly expensive by global standards. You have to consider that the amount of money it takes to live that way may simply be more than the amount of money that 40 hours/week of certain kinds of labor are worth to a rational employer. If a person is not able or willing to do work that pays enough to live in a given city, who should bear the burden of that fact? The employer, or society at large?

If you say the employer, then consider how the employers will respond. As an employer, I might want to have a nice man in my building's elevator to push buttons for guests who are laden with suitcases and small kids, but simply cannot justify paying that man $290 a week ($7.25 x 40 hours). His labor is just not worth it. I could pay him $50 a week, but not $290, and I'm not allowed to pay $50. So I do away with the job altogether, and pretty soon my customers (and everyone else's) get used to it, and so now instead of every building in NYC having one of these guys, only the ritziest hotels in town have one. So now instead of hundreds of guys having a crappy job, only 2 or 3 guys have a job (and it's still crappy). Hundreds of jobs in NYC alone disappear, which reduces opportunities for low-skilled people to learn basic job skills that (hopefully) they can leverage into a better job.

Note I am not suggesting that we expect these people to live or support a family on $50/week. There will always be people who just are not capable, mentally, physically, or both, of doing work that pays enough to live on. Our society needs to face the fact that we have poor people in our midst, stop blaming poverty on the poor, and support the poor with well-designed, easy to navigate safety net programs that don't disappear when they get a low-paying job. At the same time, we have to recognize that when we try to load the whole burden of social safety net programs onto employers, employers are going to react rationally to those increased costs by offshoring, automating, passing on costs to their customers, or just flat out eliminating marginally productive jobs.

ETA: IAppreciateIt's post #147 is saying the same thing I am saying here.
 
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I check my bag at the McDonald's near our house after every order and they forget something more than 50% of the time.
 
ImTheCaptain said:
I guess my point is that you and everyone else bitches about what something costs, but no one ever explains why they're bitching. It's my favorite dumb consumer complaint. How do you know what something should cost? I can complain about my mechanic charging me to fix my brakes because I know how much time/effort it requires and what the parts cost. All we can do is assume $1200 is a ripoff for an hour long test.
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How about an aspirin pill costing $15? It's no secret that healthcare prices are absolutely ridiculous. It's certainly not a result of a free market as bfk seemed to suggest, though -- we don't really have a free market for healthcare.
 
IAppreciateIt said:
How about an aspirin pill costing $15? It's no secret that healthcare prices are absolutely ridiculous. It's certainly not a result of a free market as bfk seemed to suggest, though -- we don't really have a free market for healthcare.
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Free market implies a high level of knowledge from the consumer....there is probably no worse market than the healthcare market as far as consumer knowledge goes...
 
Deacon923 said:
Just responding to this part of your post. Part of your argument works, part of it I think leaves out or ignores some important issues. A big part of the issue here is that what most Americans consider an acceptable standard of living (especially in high-cost-of-living areas) is fairly expensive by global standards. You have to consider that the amount of money it takes to live that way may simply be more than the amount of money that 40 hours/week of certain kinds of labor are worth to a rational employer. If a person is not able or willing to do work that pays enough to live in a given city, who should bear the burden of that fact? The employer, or society at large?

If you say the employer, then consider how the employers will respond. As an employer, I might want to have a nice man in my building's elevator to push buttons for guests who are laden with suitcases and small kids, but simply cannot justify paying that man $290 a week ($7.25 x 40 hours). His labor is just not worth it. I could pay him $50 a week, but not $290, and I'm not allowed to pay $50. So I do away with the job altogether, and pretty soon my customers (and everyone else's) get used to it, and so now instead of every building in NYC having one of these guys, only the ritziest hotels in town have one. So now instead of hundreds of guys having a crappy job, only 2 or 3 guys have a job (and it's still crappy). Hundreds of jobs in NYC alone disappear, which reduces opportunities for low-skilled people to learn basic job skills that (hopefully) they can leverage into a better job.

Note I am not suggesting that we expect these people to live or support a family on $50/week. There will always be people who just are not capable, mentally, physically, or both, of doing work that pays enough to live on. Our society needs to face the fact that we have poor people in our midst, stop blaming poverty on the poor, and support the poor with well-designed, easy to navigate safety net programs that don't disappear when they get a low-paying job. At the same time, we have to recognize that when we try to load the whole burden of social safety net programs onto employers, employers are going to react rationally to those increased costs by offshoring, automating, passing on costs to their customers, or just flat out eliminating marginally productive jobs.

ETA: IAppreciateIt's post #147 is saying the same thing I am saying here.
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50 years ago, someone could support a family from that crappy job. Now there are fewer crappy jobs and those who do have them can't. That's where the problems lie. It's not necessarily about wages, but inflation.
 
bobknightfan said:
They're part of that 47% of the American people whom it's not our job to worry about.

(And I'm still waiting for someone from our "World's Best Healthcare System" to explain why a 1-hour hearing test should cost $1,200.)
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What type of test was it, an ABR? Or a booth test?
 
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