McDonald's pushes back: "business model can't sustain $20/hr"
The California fast-food bill will raise the minimum wage for many California workers at fast-food chains to $20 an hour starting April 1.
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Cue up all the people complaining why their Big Macs are $15 in about a year's time.
I love how people on Lemmy just don't get that throwing out random hourly wage numbers don't just happen in an island. When labor costs go up, then so too will the price of a product. And when workers in other fields find out that they can make more money in a brainless job flipping burgers, then they will push for more money or threaten to quit. That's great and all until you then realize that the price for those products will go up as well. So you just tried elevating skill-free fast food workers to allow them to have more buying power, but now you just raised the price of everything which just eliminated that extra buying power. Thus inflation. Congrats! And yet Lemmy will have learnt nothing.
You are so blindly focused on skill-free jobs and completely losing sight of the bigger picture. The idea isn't to elevate these pointless Mcjobs and artificially inflating their pay. The point is to push these workers who have no skills to go out and learn a trade, get a degree or certification and just in general gain a marketable skill to where companies will pay them good money for their work. There are about 160 million workers in the US and only 2% of them work in fast food. Yet if you looked at the number of posts on Lemmy, you'd think that the majority of Americans work in that industry. Then again, what am I saying? Lemmy is probably disproportionately represented by teenagers working their first jobs, which would explain why these antiwork communities just can't stop talking about fast food.
In Denmark, they get $22/hr.
A Big Mac costs $4.6
Fun! Someone who drank the Kool-Aid and doesn't understand the context, or statistics, at all. It isn't about fast food. It is about human beings being treated as wage slaves. I want you to reconcile a few things for me with your argument.
Point 1: Since you used statistics, I will too. Drawing from https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm. There are ~147M employees in the United States. Considering the first quartile median wage, ~67.8M people make less than $40k/yr with the interquartile range biasing heavily towards the bottom (meaning most people in the lower 50% of people making less than $40k/yr are making closer to the bottom than they are the median annual wage). These jobs come from such unskilled areas as Arts, Design, Sports and Media, and Construction and Extraction Operations, aka highly skilled, trained, specialized, and educated people. Now, the current median rental price in the US is $2,052/month. That is $24,624 per year just for rent, or, let me check, 61.56% of a $40k/yr income. You know, the amount of money that 46% of hourly employees in the country do not even make.
Point 2: McDonald's (and nearly all fast food employees) make over $22/hr in Denmark. They get 401k with matching, 2+ weeks of paid vacation per year, parental leave, and much more, and a Big Mac costs less there than it does here and is made with higher quality ingredients due to the health codes of the EU. Now, please, reconcile that. The corporations know they can easily sustain on what is being demanded by the labor, they just don't want to.
Point 3: A Big Mac is already creeping towards $15 without them paying a living wage, so what fucking good is that old chestnut of corporate propaganda? It is a blatant threat to make sure the social structures of the country do their work for them of beating down their employees to make sure they stay in line. Same with your whole "skilled labor" argument. It is an artificial divide. My father even tried the "fast food jobs are for teenagers" argument once and got exceptionally deflated when I pointed out that A. they are open and obscenely busy for lunch during school hours, so they have to have adults working there and B. it is beyond illegal to discriminate wages based on age, so they should be paying the adults a living wage for the full-time hours that they dedicate that the company NEEDS to function, and the teenagers deserve to get paid the same because they are putting in the same work as the adults.
I am curious if you have ever worked a fast food job, or any minimum wage job. Especially in the last 20 years.
Cue up all the people complaining why their Big Macs are $15 in about a year’s time.
Price inflation has been due principally to the greed of companies, not to prosperity of workers. There is plenty for everyone, but wealthy owners insist on hoarding.
The point is to push these workers who have no skills to go out and learn a trade
Perhaps for you.
For others, the point is to advance beyond the suffocating narrative of punishing individuals for structural failures.
It's fucken fast food. Learn to solve problems the right way and not try to bandaid-solution every goddamn thing. A skill-free job will never be anything other than that. And will always be at the bottom rung of pay. All the silly protest signs in the world won't change that.
I am sorry, but your narrowness, haughtiness, and hostility make it unlikely that discussion would prove productive.
It's actually 4% but that doesn't matter - your talking points dressed up arguments aren't fooling anyone. Pushing people to get certifications doesn't work when the cost is so prohibitive that it's literally drawn along class lines. And for another thing lots of these mcjobs offer upward mobility into management and marketing - should people not vye for those roles because you seem to only think in Republican talking points? Should they not get a decent wage to support their families because you can't leave your bubble? And what of the cycle of upper management who earn often 50-100 times the median wage of their employees - are they really worth as much as 50 to a 100+ people and their families? Of course not.
I didn't need to read past your first sentence, because it's pretty absurd when you consider McDonald's already pays over $20/hour in countries that require it and Big Macs there cost barely more than they do here. Oh, and the employees there get full benefits too.
So whatever talking points you've parroted in your wall of text, they don't fit the reality that's already been here for years.
