http://www.wsj.com/articles/n-y-panel-is-set-to-propose-15-fast-food-wage-1437352435



I'm at a loss for words.

FUAC

No problem... after they install the automated burger cooking equipment, they'll only need one guy to load the hoppers.

This is wonderful - that is close to what most college grads start with - So you take the incentive away from getting educated.  A college grad gets the same as McDonalds?  it won't trickle up - it will only take away incentive to build skills to bbuild future buisness.


Of course $15/hr is still less than NY welfare's value and your don't have to go to work

NY has a fast food wage board?

Why?

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The meeting is wend day morning

Why do fast food workers get to get $15/hr...whats wrong with the rest of the workers, I mean don't ditch diggers deserve $15 an hour, what about Target/Wally World employees....are their families any less important than fast food workers?

WTF, seriously....

Emotion driving legislation rather than fact and reason.

Give them their $15 but then watch all those order takers replaced with this:






Image at https://ihumanmedia.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/mcdonalds.jpg

McDonald's is also working on robotic systems to prepare and cook the food too so you may get to the point where you only need perhaps 5 people running a restaurant.  You keep raising the cost of a job that isn't worth $15 and you will find automation will solve the problem.  No union, no benefits, no HR, no payroll and related regulations.  Sweet!

 
 
 

They're gonna need it to pay for the $6 French fries.

Welcome to April.  It was a done deal when Lil Andy directed the labor board to make it so.  Time to open a sneaker and car accessory store in the hood.

Maybe more people will skip that junk and cook at home more.

McDonalds, and all the other fast food joints, used to be a cheap place to eat. Not any more. For the same price you can go to Applebee's or Friday's. Not that there any better. Or like you said, cook at home.

Agreed it is completely nonsensical.  As others have pointed out that $15 an hour is hastening their obsolescence.  The increased pay makes kiosks and machines more economically viable.

I don't see this ending well for anyone. Restaurants will close, workers will get laid off, and the remaining establishments will be charging $20 for a hamburger. Increased prices will drive customers away. These fuck-tards should have though about what they wished for.

Another bullshit liberal policy that will drive away even more jobs and business from NY state. Brilliant!

outstanding and they are getting off the welfare roles also ?

My friends!  A glimpse in to the future!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFiDoOgRTpk

I wonder when Cuomo and the anti fracking crowd will mandate that we all need to use the 3 sea shells, you know, for the environment or something.

But NYS is open for business hahaha

No shit, that was my first thought.  Somebody needed to make some phoney baloney jobs for election campaign workers?

Shit.. Im gonna get a second job a McD's to fund my gun habit if they really are increasing the min wage to 15 for fast food workers

So Sous Chefs with an Associates will make less than someone with a GED and a rap sheet? Equality at its best

Another handout to the hoodrats.

Are we talking NYC or the whole state?

All the articles I've read point to the raise being statewide.  I could expect this sort of B.S. from NY City, but on a state level this is absolutely insane.

I passad by McDonald's today and the wife wanted to get a "happy meal" fot the kids. I said I am not buying from these people ever again. FUAC!

The Camel enter the Tent nose first.....Democrats know how fucked things are now and how much more they will be to come, so they'll say and do ANYTHING to keep that position of Power and Influence.  

Think about all the folks that aren't even smart enough to boil water....need I say more?

When I want fast food I find a Fried Cat (Chinese) restaurant; hot meal of vegetables, rice, and an egg roll for LESS than what Mc D's serves...pick on it all you want, that's MY choice and I like it!  

You think they don't?

Well, that makes zero sense, but whatever floats your boat!

I hate that Cuomo just mandated that people with no education or skill have to get paid $15/hr. I know college graduates with bachelors economics who work in retail banking and make the same. I hope the whole fast food sector goes bankrupt and it blows up right into Cuomo's disgusting disfigured face.

You missed my point.  The fact that you skipped McDonalds today, before the wage hike goes into effect, does nothing.

You couldn't pay me to eat that crap.

I used to eat it rather frequently as a kid but as an adult that watches cholesterol and fat intake it is a no-go.  I do sometimes stop at McD's for a cup of coffee.  It isn't half bad and the price is good.  Funny thing is the last time I was at a McD's was in Tonawanda near Gander Mountain on Young Street two years ago on a trip back to LI from Canada.



 

Maybe it's because I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how one branch of government can unilaterally increase the minimum wage for one industry. What happened to equal protection and checks and balances?

http://news10.com/2015/07/22/wage-board-recommends-15hr-for-fast-food-workers/

I don't understand this state

If it goes through, it will mean the end of "fast food" franchises as we know them.  I believe that  the automated ordering systems might stem the tide, and if they can ever get the "cooking" automated then things might  go ok for them.  This will, however be just the first step into raising the minimum wage for all workers in this state and with an almost doubling in the minimum wage, you'll see the complete destruction of this states economy, including downstate.  My one kid makes minimum wage working in what would now qualify as fast food, and my other kid makes $12/hour landscaping both during the summer while they're out of college.  Raise the fast food wage to $15 and one will be out of a job, and the other might not have a job next year if this goes across the board.  That means I have to hire 1 or both of them and pay them to do stuff I do myself now and take money out of my pocket to do so.  The minimum wage was never supposed to allow for supporting a family, certainly not in an unskilled, uneducated field.

NY is open for business

I despise commissions.  It's always a bunch of politcal friends of politicians and hacks.  Screams of corruption and patronage to me.

I despise commissions.  It's always a bunch of politcal friends of politicians and hacks.  Screams of corruption and patronage to me.

GD double tap.  something is goofy here today.  We're on page two and the counter at the center bottom is still reading  page 1.

From Fox News -

The liberals are all creaming themselves over this shit.



It will backfire.

Source

Three men in a room strikes again. That's it? He can just completely bypass the legislature like that?

What. The. Fuck.

What's the difference?  He's been telling them what to pass anyway since taking office. It's not like there is a real GOP presence in the Legislature that has any say in the matter.  

I hope it does. Upstate by 2021, NYC by 2018.

A wordy, but thorough take-down by Forbes of FUAC's stupidity for forcing this pay hike.  You can have fries with your stupid rate hike biatch!  

New York's $15 Fast-food Minimum Wage Will Be a Failure

We expect the news later today, as Forbes writer Clare O’Connor has pointed out, that New York’s Wage Board will approve Governor Cuomo’s idea of a $15 an hour minimum wage for fast food workers in that state. The leaks have been that it will be approved and no one should really be all that surprised at that. The Board was appointed by Cuomo, he’s announced what he expects the conclusion to be and the possibility that the conclusion will be anything but what the Governor wants is most remote.

So, it looks like $15 an hour will become the New York State minimum for fast food workers. All of which is a very bad idea of course. For the Governor seems not to understand the basics of the economics surrounding this issue. Welfare payments are not, on the whole, subsidies to the employers of low wage labor, that low minimum wages have minimal unemployment effects does not mean that large ones do and finally, he’s not attacking the profits of the big corporations at all: he’s attacking the livelihoods of the franchise owners.

Here’s Cuomo’s speech when he announced the Wage Board (and, largely, what the result was going to be):

So think about what we have really been doing. The taxpayers of this nation have been subsidizing the workers at McDonald’s and Burger King at a cost of over $7 billion annually and that’s just wrong. Here in the state of New York, we pay more than any state in the nation to subsidize welfare. We pay an average of $6,800 per worker – per worker – through public assistance. It costs this state $700 million a year to subsidize the profits at McDonald’s and Burger King and that is wrong and that must stop. It is not like government subsidizing small businesses or mom-and-pop businesses. This year McDonalds made $4.67 billion and Burger King made $291 million, they don’t deserve subsidies from the taxpayers of New York State.


That’s his first mistake of course. Welfare payments are not, by and large, subsidies to employers. Here’s Arindrajit Dube (a left leaning scholar who supports a minimum wage rise by the way) on this very point:


A final line of argument is that these public assistance programs have become de-facto subsidies for low-wage employers. For a program to be a subsidy for an employer, it needs to lower wages. Is this plausible for the public assistance programs considered? I think it is for the EITC, but not for other programs. Depending on where one is on the EITC schedule, that policy can increase work incentives. And there is a lot of empirical evidence showing EITC encourages labor force participation. An unintended consequence of that labor supply response, however, is that employers capture some of the tax subsidies. This can happen in a simple supply and demand framework, where an increased labor supply to the market drive wages down. This can also happen in a bargaining context where the size of the bilateral surplus expands from lower taxes, and employers capture some of this increased surplus. Work by UC Berkeley’s Jesse Rothstein suggests that for every $1 of transfer to workers using the EITC, post-tax income rises only by $0.73 because of employer capture.

But what about other programs like food stamps or housing assistance? These means tested public assistance programs are not tied to work, and we should not expect them to lower wages. Let’s take food stamps, which are available to eligible families whether or not a family member works or not. Indeed, when people are not working, they are more likely to be eligible for food stamps since their family incomes will be lower. Therefore, SNAP is likely to raise, and not lower a worker’s reservation wages—the fallback position if she loses her job. This will tend to contract labor supply (or improve a worker’s bargaining position), putting an upward pressure on the wage. Whether or not wages are increased is an empirical matter: there is evidence that the initial roll-out of the food stamps program across counties in the 1970s lowered work hours, consistent with an increase in the reservation wage. The key point is that it is difficult to imagine how food stamps would lower wages. And if they don’t lower wages, they can’t be thought of as subsidies to low wage employers. The same logic applies to other means tested programs like energy or housing assistance. Moreover, these conclusions hold in a wide array of models of the labor market, including ones that emphasize bargaining or efficiency wage concerns.

We can indeed think of the EITC as being, in part, a subsidy to employers. And the general estimation is that about 25% of the EITC is in fact a subsidy to employers, the other 75% going to the workers. But of course the EITC is only a fraction of the welfare system. and as Dube points out, the other parts of that welfare system push wages up. The net effect of the whole welfare system thereby being that wages are raised, not lowered, by the existence of that welfare system. Cuomo’s second mistake is contained within that first quote:


It is not like government subsidizing small businesses or mom-and-pop businesses. This year McDonalds made $4.67 billion and Burger King made $291 million, they don’t deserve subsidies from the taxpayers of New York State.

Neither of these two burger chains control the wages or staffing levels of the restaurants. Because they are brands: the actual businesses are run by franchisees. And the franchisees are much closer to Mom and Pop stores than they are to the giant corporations. So, the actual attack here is on the profit margins of small business. Exactly the opposite of what the Governor says.

The third mistake is the actual rate of the minimum wage itself. As is well known, moderate or reasonable minimum wages don’t have much effect on unemployment. Simply because not that many people earn as little as what we might describe as a reasonable or moderate minimum wage. This point is indeed generally and internationally known:

The ILO, a UN agency, found that collective bargaining has a positive effect on wages without much negative impact on overall employment or economic performances. Similarly minimum wages, “if set at a reasonable level”, should not have an adverse impact on employment levels, the report said.

Quite so.

The general estimation is that a minimum wage higher than 50% of median wage is one that is not reasonable, is in fact immoderate. This is why even the EPI (with the above Dube’s support) argues for a $12 minimum wage, half the full time full year median wage. I think they’re in error there and that we should be considering the overall median wage which for the US is more like $17. But we can also look at international comparisons.

Many will tell us, indeed many have told me here, that Australia has a $20 minimum wage and they still have Big Macs so what’s the problem? Except that that $20 is the nominal wage and that’s not how we should do things across countries. We should take account of the different purchasing power across countries, adjust, as the jargon has it, for PPP. And the OECD table that does that is here.


You will see that Australia’s PPP adjusted real minimum wage is actually only $10.50 in US money. The highest is France with $10.70 (to the extent that you consider Luxembourg a country rather than a city, that’s at $10.80). These are all significantly below this proposed rate for New York State fast food workers.

Catherine Rampell makes this point in a slightly different manner in the Washington Post:

Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 — a policy change that most Americans support — would likely boost the earnings of about 16.5 million workers while reducing total employment by about 500,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This is a trade-off that many allies of low-wage workers are willing to accept — particularly those of us who worry that anti-poverty spending programs may allow employers to further depress worker pay.

There really are costs associated with a rise in the minimum wage. And there’s also the point about regional variation:

In other, lower-cost parts of the country, however, a $15 minimum — which, remember, is more than double the current federal level — would likely throw many, many more people out of work.

In Arkansas, the median hourly wage is $14.01. In Mississippi, it’s an astoundingly low $13.76. It’s likewise below $15 in six other states, and three U.S. territories. That means a $15 minimum wage could be binding on more than half of the jobs in these places. In economically troubled Puerto Rico, where the current federal minimum of $7.25 is arguably already too high relative to labor productivity, it could affect more than three-quarters of all jobs, depending on how many employers found a way to wrangle an exemption.

Yes, it’s distressing that wages in these states and territories are so low. But trying to change the prevailing wage — rather than just the bottom of the income distribution — by fiat is likely to cause massive job losses.

Which brings us to New York State, where there is a rather large variation between upstate and down, as Megan McArdle points out:


Syracuse is slightly more fortunate, because it wasn’t so heavily dependent on one firm. Nonetheless, its population now stands at less than 140,000, down from 220,000 in the 1950s. And the story is replicated in almost any town you can name in upstate New York. Utica. Elmira. Buffalo. Troy. These were major industrial towns, once. Now they are slowly collapsing in on themselves, surrounded by the discarded shells of once prosperous factories.

There are any number of candidates to blame. Cold weather. The Saint Lawrence Seaway, which destroyed the Erie Canal as a viable economic channel. New York’s business-unfriendly environment, which has gotten worse and worse as power has shifted towards New York City and the financial industry which is not much affected by the various work rules its employees like to vote for.

And we can drill a little deeper into the numbers as well. The median wage for the entire state is $19.65, a little higher than the national one (and thus we’d expect that full year full time one as the EPI uses to be higher than the national one of $24). But in Binghampton it’s only $16.05. Every burger flipper in the area must now be paid darn close to the average wage for every job in the area? Elmira’s not going to do much better with a median of $16.31. Glens Falls at $15.30?

How many pre-school teachers (median wage, $9.96 in Glens Falls) are there going to be when Maccy D’s is forced to pay $15 for cooking the fries? Come to that, how many people will there be left cooking those fries?

The problem here is really very simple. Various political types have listened to the message that modest minimum wages have modest effects. There’s not many people put out of work by them as not many people earn the sort of sums we describe as modest in this context. But what they’ve heard is that minimum wages do not put people out of work. And that’s not at all what the research does say. That effect will be greater for any particular level of minimum wage the lower the general wage level is. And that makes New York a really rather bad place to try to have a higher state wide minimum. Simply because the difference in wage levels between the old industrial north of the state and the currently much richer south is so wide.

This rise to $15 for just the burger flippers in New York State is a seriously bad idea. Which is perhaps why Governor Cuomo has had to bring it about through undemocratic, executive, action. Maybe the reason the State Senate wouldn’t pass it was not because they’re all the most appalling Republicans who want to trample the poor into the dust, but just because it’s not a very good idea?

I saw the Clown Prince on the news Yelling about this "accomplishment"  It was right up there with the ten boolitz to kihl a deeah speech.

Exactly Who is he yelling at?  He is surrounded completely by his supporters in these speeches and to news cameras within feet of his ugly face - why yell like Hitler?  Is it just what facists do?

It would have a much greater chance of being screwed up or derailed if it had to go through our dysfunctional legislature.

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It is definitely not the way the system is supposed to work, Cuomo just doesn't give a damn

I'm not entirely sure that I make much more than that...actually about $18.50 after taxes and considering the amount of hours my salary is divided by...that was a waste of 7 years
 




$15 isn't a bad deal for 35 solid hours of doing work you don't have to think about, which requires no real education, has no real consequences for screwing up and has minimal conflict


 

My wife is a pastry chef for a smallish, private ski resort.  She has a 2 year culinary arts degree, 14 years of experience, 10 of them with her current employer. Someone flipping burgers will now, by law, be making a touch more than she does.  

She make wedding cakes that have been featured in the local paper for fucks sake.  Ridiculous.