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McDonald's Tries to Help Its Minimum Wage Workers

Those McDonald's workers need to stop complaining and get a job.
 
WFFaithful said:
$7.25 an hour, 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year is only $22,620.
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I would think, although I don't know for sure, that federal overtime laws apply to workers of fast food restaurants. If so, 60 hours per week equates to $26,364 including time and a half for the 20 hours each week over 40.

That is, of course, assuming the manager or owner allows a worker to go into overtime hours.
 
Shorty said:
I would think, although I don't know for sure, that federal overtime laws apply to workers of fast food restaurants. If so, 60 hours per week equates to $26,364 including time and a half for the 20 hours each week over 40.

That is, of course, assuming the manager or owner allows a worker to go into overtime hours.
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Oh so now we're talking big bucks. Thanks for the correction. I don't know what they're complaining about.

But seriously, the original calculation is more accurate because a fast food worker working 60 hours is most likely doing it at two separate jobs.
 
So, I guess the question becomes should minimum wage be a living wage and when calculating what is a living wage are we calculating that on a 40 hour work week. Anybody that works full time should earn a living wage but does that mean we will require companies to guarantee a minimum number of hours per week?

And if we are making minimum wage a living wage does that make "Fry Cook" a career or are there still jobs designed for the high school student working part time?
 
The question is should taxpayers or employers make up the gap between what someone makes when fulfilling their duty to hold down a full-time job that contributes to society and what they need to live and raise a family.
 
Your answer or mine?
 
Shorty said:
I would think, although I don't know for sure, that federal overtime laws apply to workers of fast food restaurants. If so, 60 hours per week equates to $26,364 including time and a half for the 20 hours each week over 40.

That is, of course, assuming the manager or owner allows a worker to go into overtime hours.
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1) wow, that's a lot of money to live off of in america.
2) big assumption... a good manager is one who has no emps on OT pay. it's illegal, but some managers will still force workers to clock out during non-peak hours and sit in the break room. I promise this still goes on but not as bad as it used to be.

anyway i need to get back to the game(s).
 
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dmcheatw said:
1) wow, that's a lot of money to live off of in america.
2) big assumption... a good manager is one who has no emps on OT pay. it's illegal, but some managers will still force workers to clock out during non-peak hours and sit in the break room. I promise this still goes on but not as bad as it used to be.

anyway i need to get back to the game(s).
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1) I agree. Not a lot of money to live on in America. I didn't say it was. I was just engaging in the national past time of the boards- correcting another poster.

2) I agree again. That's why I used the word assuming.
 
Shorty said:
1) I agree. Not a lot of money to live on in America. I didn't say it was. I was just engaging in the national past time of the boards- correcting another poster.

2) I agree again. That's why I used the word assuming.
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copy that. we agree. how boring (;
 
PhDeac said:
The question is should taxpayers or employers make up the gap between what someone makes when fulfilling their duty to hold down a full-time job that contributes to society and what they need to live and raise a family.
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While it's great that people want to find work and want to work full time, why are they still only capable of making $7.25/hour? $7.25/hour is high school/no skill/anyone-with-a-pulse can do it work....that's why it's minimum wage.
I'm not all about abolishing a minimum wage but if you raise it too high (I'm not entirely against indexing it or something, but to suggest that minimum wage can approach living wage is laughable to me) then you're not going to have entry level jobs (automation/productivity increases) that a lot of people need to "learn how to work". I understand that a lot of people are marginalized by society, some justly and some unjustly, but an individual isn't just responsible for wanting to work 40 hours a week (it's a start though), he's responsible for making himself capable of working. (and ideally society help provide the tools and encourage the desire to better himself)
My point is that minimum wage, in today's world, isn't supposed to allow a person to support themselves, much less a family. it's basically for high school kids or adults who are only able to marginally function in society.
Blaming the culture of poverty, school systems, The Man, whoever is all good and well as there is plenty of blame to go around, but if you're 35 years old and have been working minimum wage your whole life, then you're telling me that minimum wage is all you're capable of....that's unfortunate, but these people live and will always live in our (and every) society and it's society's burden to deal with them. (ideally, you'd want to educate them to a point where they want/can escape poverty, but obviously that's easier said than done)
 
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So what so we do? You clarified "today's world." Minimum wage workers aren't much different than 40 years ago except perhaps being more educated.

So why do we blame them for not being able to live at a base standard without being a burden on society (which apparently doesn't include their employer).
 
Baconwfu said:
While it's great that people want to find work and want to work full time, why are they still only capable of making $7.25/hour? $7.25/hour is high school/no skill/anyone-with-a-pulse can do it work....that's why it's minimum wage.
I'm not all about abolishing a minimum wage but if you raise it too high (I'm not entirely against indexing it or something, but to suggest that minimum wage can approach living wage is laughable to me) then you're not going to have entry level jobs (automation/productivity increases) that a lot of people need to "learn how to work". I understand that a lot of people are marginalized by society, some justly and some unjustly, but an individual isn't just responsible for wanting to work 40 hours a week (it's a start though), he's responsible for making himself capable of working. (and ideally society help provide the tools and encourage the desire to better himself)
My point is that minimum wage, in today's world, isn't supposed to allow a person to support themselves, much less a family. it's basically for high school kids or adults who are only able to marginally function in society.
Blaming the culture of poverty, school systems, The Man, whoever is all good and well as there is plenty of blame to go around, but if you're 35 years old and have been working minimum wage your whole life, then you're telling me that minimum wage is all you're capable of....that's unfortunate, but these people live and will always live in our (and every) society and it's society's burden to deal with them. (ideally, you'd want to educate them to a point where they want/can escape poverty, but obviously that's easier said than done)
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Do you think every person working minimum wage in this country has only worked for minimum wage their whole life? Or even the majority of people making minimum wage right now?
 
DeacinBama said:
Interesting question. Some things that I'm sure you've already considered:

1) Is full time, i.e. 40 hrs/wk., reasonable for people in this situation? I work 60 hours a week without thinking twice. As much as I'd love to work less, taking 2/3 the pay for 2/3 the work isn't an option for me. Is it reasonable to expect low-income workers to work more than 40 hours if it means the difference between a livable vs. non-livable wage?

2) "Raising a family" is pretty nebulous. Big difference between 1 kid and 5. If society assumes the burden of paying a livable wage to raise a family, to what degree does it get to determine the cost of that family as a function of size?

3) To what degree, if at all, do we factor in advancement? That is, do we calculate a livable wage based on the idea that the minimum wage is a dead-end? Or do we assume that minimum-wage jobs are temporary, and there is an expectation that an employee will eventually progress to higher paying positions?

I'm not trying to espouse a position; I don't feel informed enough to do so. I'm just intrigued by this question and hope to elicit responses.
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Good post. Some comments in response to further the conversation. None of this should be taken as a direct response to your post or attributing any motives or attitudes to you, I'm talking in broad terms about society as a whole:

1. It is very common for poor people to work multiple jobs and more than 40 hours a week. Often there are no full time jobs available, so they cobble together 2 or 3 part time gigs and work more than 40 hours (but no overtime or benefits). Factor in the time spent riding the bus around to these jobs.

2. This is a problem that's hard to deal with. On the one hand, we don't want to give people incentives to have more children than they can raise, but we also don't want kids starving because their parents made bad decisions. Consider that people have less children as they move up in income and socio-economic status, so while there will always be anecdotes of people raising 5 kids on the dole, on a macro scale reducing the poverty rate will reduce large families.

3. This is where a historical perspective is useful, I think. If you go back 50 years, or even 30 years ago, there were tons of jobs in the mills and factories that didn't require a lot of skill or achievement and certainly not a college degree. You punched a clock and stamped widgets all day, and made enough to feed your family, own a car and a house, and maybe take a modest vacation. Nobody called those "dead end jobs" even though there was little opportunity for advancement. Even before that, there was tons of unskilled agricultural labor - hard, manual labor with no opportunity for advancement, but that paid enough to feed a family. There was a general agreement in the population that 40 hours a week of honest work should allow you to live a decent, not extravagant, life.

Now we've found ourselves in a situation where those factory and agricultural jobs have been outsourced or replaced by technology. The only thing that's replaced them is low-wage retail, food service, and health care jobs (think CNAs and med techs - bed pan changers). There are still, and will always be, people who lose the genetic lottery and just aren't suited for much skilled work. But somehow there is an idea in society that these people don't deserve to make enough money to live a modest frugal life and raise a family. For some reason, a lot of people think that these kinds of jobs are less deserving or noble or something than factory or farming jobs. I think it is not coincidental that these jobs tend to be done by people of color and that has an impact on the perception in some quarters, sadly.

Historically, the employers at the factories were paying a living wage, not the taxpayer. Maybe that was good, maybe that was bad and drove the jobs to places with cheaper labor. Either way, we're now at a place in history where conditions have greatly changed for low-skilled people and working 40 hours a week is no longer good enough to get a living wage. This was not always the case.

Anyway thought provoking stuff and a long rambling post.
 
PhDeac said:
So what so we do? You clarified "today's world." Minimum wage workers aren't much different than 40 years ago except perhaps being more educated.




So why do we blame them for not being able to live at a base standard without being a burden on society (which apparently doesn't include their employer).
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Today's world is much more complicated than the world was 50 years ago. Of course, for the last 400 years anyone at any time would've been able to say that, but no doubt that the world has changed more in the last 50-100 years than any other time in history. Now, in order to be "functional" you need a certain set of skills to command wages that one would be able to support oneself on. It takes more "education" (both formal and non-formal) to make it in this world. If we just think about formal education, 100 years ago, if you could read, then you probably make ends meet. 50 years ago, if you graduated high school you could make ends meet. Now, sometimes an undergraduate degree doesn't even get your foot in the door. The point i'm trying to illustrate is that the world is complicated and an individual needs to be more educated just to be functional in this world....however, for all intents-and-purposes, it takes just as long to learn to read, graduate high school and get a college degree as it did 100 years ago and there are plenty on the marginalized parts of society who have missed a lot of the education that "normal" people get naturally. There are still vast sections of society who can barely read and haven't graduated high school.

I would argue that part of the problem is that minimum wage workers aren't more educated than they were 40 years ago and that is the problem.
What do you do about it? I'm not proposing a solution, however I personally think that you can't force a living wage on people who can't command a living wage.

What is meant by "why do we blame them"?

BeachBumDeac said:
Do you think every person working minimum wage in this country has only worked for minimum wage their whole life? Or even the majority of people making minimum wage right now?
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No, I don't think that
I don't know many people still working minimum, or even close to minimum wage, so I can only think back to the jobs I had from 16-22 when I was making/worked around a lot of people making low wages (not necessarily minimum wage, but close to it). I would think the majority of those people had never done much better than they were doing when I worked with them (I would include myself, at that time, in that group of people). There were a few people who I can think of who, for one reason or the other, was probably working a job beneath their ability, but for the most part it was young people (of various aspiration) and older people (which I would've called people over 30 at that time) who either couldn't (whether they really couldn't or just told themselves they couldn't I don't know and I'm sure it varied from person to person) do any better (either they weren't smart enough or they were being held down by something....society, kids, culture, lack of intelligence/education)

I say that to say, I would think most people on minimum wage (or near minimum wage) have probably never made much more than that (and for a high school/college kid, that's not unexpected), but I can't say for sure
 
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Shorty said:
Did you pick up an application?
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Originally Posted by RJKarl
As I drove down Beach Blvd. yesterday, I saw a sign in the IN N Out window, they are starting people at $10.50/hour, offering free meals and benefits for FT workers.

Why can't MCD's do the same?


Hahahahahaha...tnx Shorty
 
Baconwfu said:
No, I don't think that
I don't know many people still working minimum, or even close to minimum wage, so I can only think back to the jobs I had from 16-22 when I was making/worked around a lot of people making low wages (not necessarily minimum wage, but close to it). I would think the majority of those people had never done much better than they were doing when I worked with them (I would include myself, at that time, in that group of people). There were a few people who I can think of who, for one reason or the other, was probably working a job beneath their ability, but for the most part it was young people (of various aspiration) and older people (which I would've called people over 30 at that time) who either couldn't (whether they really couldn't or just told themselves they couldn't I don't know and I'm sure it varied from person to person) do any better (either they weren't smart enough or they were being held down by something....society, kids, culture, lack of intelligence/education)

I say that to say, I would think most people on minimum wage (or near minimum wage) have probably never made much more than that (and for a high school/college kid, that's not unexpected), but I can't say for sure
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I think you'd be very surprised... especially since the economic downturn the last few years, a lot of people got laid off from decent paying jobs and the only available jobs around are low paying fast food jobs.
 
EatLeadCommie said:
I, sir, am a fast food junkie...or was until I hit 40. Now all I do is buy fast food salads.

But, my bad. High schoolers, immigrants (usually women making a supplemental wage to their husband's), and ex cons who can't work anywhere else. I'm talking about the dipshit positions, not the manager ones. C'mon, dude. They cook shit, put it under a heat lamp, or take an order. It isn't rocket science. It's monkey work, and if somebody is in a position like that having to support a family, then 99% of the time it's their own damn fault. The other 1% it's because they have some kind of brain damage, in which case they should be drawing disability to supplement their income.
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And if you don't ask nicely you may get the 'extra' special sauce for no added charge.

skills & chit
 
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