I agree, tovarisch. I despise deerty yankey kepetelists.

Waiting tables is not a steady income of 12-14/hr due to that wage being dependent on tips and most are part time to begin with.  Being a welder is skilled labor and either you live in an area with a high cost of living or they are having a very difficult time finding people because around here a warehouse job nets about 9/hr.  I know this because I look for a better job everyday and I couldn't even meet the rent and utilities at 9/hr.

And how would you address the staffing requirements? I don't want to wait 30 minutes for a burger because you just fired a third of the workers.
I don't see anyone addressing the very real issue that companies set their wages as low as they do KNOWING that their employees can only make ends meet by turning to public aid.
All of us are subsidizing these low wages by paying the difference through social services

 





The real question, is do you do anything to prepare, train, or educate yourself to be more marketable for a better job?   Daydreaming looking at craigslist dosn't mean anything.



 

Nationalizing the fast food industry is the only way to fix this.

That's a fair criticism of ME, but I don't work at McDonalds which is the group of workers we're discussing

Why stop at unskilled labor?  I order to be fair to skilled labor, shouldn't they get a raise too?  Would it be fair for them to make the same amount?
We already don't throw people to the "wolves" in this society.  When obesity instead of starvation is associated with poverty, people aren't being thrown to the wolves.  Some jobs aren't intended to be a lifelong career.

I like the way you think...

When I was poor and working my first job as an adult out of the house, I had clothes, a few cooking utensils, a few books, a few records, and the stereo I'd had since middle school.  Stay home until I'm 26?  Unthinkable, as I needed to get out into the world and earn a living...
I had a shit job.  I lived in a shitty house, with roommates, drove a moped, ate tomato pie, rice, and chicken (because my roommate could get free tomatoes, rice was cheap, and chicken was cheap.)  I worked hard, kept my mouth shut, and proved to my boss that I was the guy he wanted when it was time to promote.  I damn sure didn't spend time on internet forums complaining about not being able to earn a living.
Today's whiners have (the latest) smartphones, cars, iPads, Starbuck's Reward Cards, and eat expensive organic foods paid for by you and me.  They don't give a rat's ass about working hard or doing what it takes to better themselves.
There are people in the food service industry who smile, work hard, are cheerful, and are happy to be gainfully employed.  Most of them, I would wager, either have two jobs, or go to school when they're not slinging burgers.  When I cross paths with one of them (and you know who they are) I always try to let corporate know via the 'Customer Feedback' card that they have a good employee there.
As to the lazy whiners.... I say, STFU and recognize that life is hard.  Not everyone deserves to live well.  Your lack of sacrifice is not my problem.


 

Just callin' it like I see it.



 

No one deserves a middle-class living wage unless they earn it.  That takes education, and generally, a skill set that comes from experience one can't get from working at

McDonald's.





 

The stupid....it burns

Out comes the socialist.

You know what happens when wages are artificially raised?

Well, go ahead genius

What he is saying that you missed is that the Middle Class is disappearing. The jobs that paid well are disappearing.
We are becoming a low pay service based economy. So where is the person stuck in the sea of low paying service jobs supposed to go if they want a better life?
Sure, education can improve your skillsets, but not everyone is cut out to be an engineer or someone in the hard sciences
You used to be able to support yourself with a decent job without having a job and the training that goes along with it as an engineer or a doctor.

Why should a business that employs unskilled labor pay skilled labor rates?  That's bad business.

I am willing to go along with the living wage crowd if and only if they are ready to do away with ALL transfer payments including SNAP, housing assistance, Medicaid, Head start, and the like.

Let the consumer make the decision on what they are willing to pay for. She should have paid attention in school and learned the skills to get her out of an entry level, no experience, no skill job.  She made her bed, now she can sleep in it.

1st.  Thanks for that shit link that freezes the computer for 20 seconds while all its mal-ware and bullshit ads load.

2nd.  Thats a good way to fight the obesity problem.  Effectively the US taxpayer subsidizes cheap big macs by paying the employees of mcdonalds part of their salary.

BRILLIANT!!!!

I'm lovin' it.  (said by properly demographically blended attractive woman.)

Hey burger flippers; here's the secret to having more money when you're broke:

Work a second job.

You will find less kids born to "single moms" also helpful.

You're Welcome.

OTR truck driving is one

Probably the highest paying "unskilled" job I know of that is in demand.

Go to that school in Texas for $500, get your CDL in a couple of days then hit the road and make at a minimum of $40k/year

It's all well and good until the ghetto crowd demands an increase in their public assistance in order to pay for $9.50 McDonalds Hamburgers and $5.00 fries for seven or eight kids.

"McDonald's raised its prices; the greedy bastards are starving my family".

Don't they drug test though?  I've always seemed to see a common thread between recreational drug use, and people's desire to raise their station in life.
 

I would think so.  bummer

Industries die. New industries are born. It is the way of the world. Instead of steel fabrication, you adapt to technology administration, for instance. They don't make covered wagon anymore; those workers learned something else. There is no work for digging tunnels by hand; those workers learned something else. The workforce adapts, or the host dies. Our workforce, these days, doesn't want to adapt.



There are middle class, entry level opportunities in the USA. They exist. I hire for them often -- I have hired I(and have a hard time finding) entry level ($30k) management jobs for 20 year old kids with no education. If they hustle. Workers have to look for opportunities and be willing to adapt. You have to be educatable. You have to be motivated. You (generally) have to be drug-free. You have to be all the things the employer at the mill was looking for 40 years ago.



Let's be honest, the people we are discussing in this thread aren't unemployed machine operators from the 'old economy'. They wouldn't have been hired at the mill, either. They just want to be paid like they had been. We aren't talking about people who came on hard times, who suddenly find themselves stuggling to maintain their standard of living at the only job they could find to replace their income. That is not who we are talking about, is it...
 

Elitist Drugists!   Always trying to keep the groovy man down.



 

Pwnd!

/thread

Pay a "livable wage" to people with zero skills and watch how in 10+ years 3/4 of the country will be making "livable wage" with no skills at all. It's just like welfare.



How about we quit subsidizing the bottom end?

The 2nd job I ever had was at McDonalds. I was 15 years old making $3.35 per hour. It sucked and eventually it got to where I only worked 1 day a week and that was to come in with my cousin and all we did was unload the truck when it came. Getting $27 every two weeks back in 1983 was just enough to cover beer money for the weekend.

That won't work unless the 1/3 who get fired are non-essential.  If their non-essential, fire them now.  How would you make up for the man-power loss?  Giving raises to the remaining employees isn't going to get the job done IMHO.

College.

Get my order right, and/or get it out actually fast for once, then you can have a pay raise.

Work them harder.    





If I could do 18 hours on 6 off for weeks working oil and gas in the Gulf, a few extra hour at the fry station won't hurt, plus they'll make more.
ETA-  Plus, you act like who the offer would be going to are not easily replaceable.
 

So McD is following the Walmart model.  Have your employees receive support from the government.  Great.

This would just exacerbate the problem we have today of so many people coming out of college with crippling debt and a useless degree.  Unless you think everyone is capable of getting a STEM degree, which is simply fantasy.

This....The original business model for fast food was designed around this concept. Part time jobs for teenagers and retirees with management being the only full-timers.

There's no logical reason to stop at a mere "livable wage".
Why not decree that everyone receive wages sufficient to make them rich?
It's a shortcut to utopia, fer sher.

and completely untrue.

but it briefs well.

I was making $9.75 an hour as part time summer help in 2004 during college. Lowest paid people at that job.

Of course it was night shift at a book factory. Don't think the McDonalds crowd would enjoy that.

Don't look for problems, look for solutions. I, and all my friends from HS and college, graduated with liberal arts degrees and we are all gainfully employed. We all started out at a 2 year community college to save on those first years of tuition and then went to a modest state college. We are all middle to upper middle class. One is a millionaire who makes six figures.

When I was a young cop, making $25k a year with a Masters degree,  I had "more money" than most of the other guys earning the same money I was earning. This really got under a couple of guys skin. The difference, you ask? I didn't blow money on getting drunk, child support, girlfriends, and ex-wives. I lived like a fucking monk for 5 years because I knew that the police department was a stepping stone to my next job. During those 5 years I did everything I could to improve myself and make myself more marketable to my next employer. I didn't end up getting the job I was shooting for during those monk-like 5 years but ended up somewhere else, somewhere better. I was very fortunate but a lot of that good fortune was because I went out of my way to improve myself on my own time and with my own time. I got married, bought a house, and a nice car after I could afford it not when I wanted it.

A lot of people only see obstacles. Obstacles can be overcome with enough effort.

PS I started off bagging groceries in HS for about $3.35 a hour and "moved up" to being a fry cook at McDonald's for $4-something a hour while in community college. The idea is that you start in these jobs and the then move along to better things. I never "didn't work".

You've never been an employer.
Those evil companies determine whether the cost to have an employee is more or less than the revenue which the company can reasonably expect the employee to generate or contribute toward generating. If the revenue is greater the employee is hired. If not, the employee isn't hired OR the cost is reduced.
NOTE: The cost of an employee to the employer is far greater than the amount of the wages. The employer deducts from the wages it is willing to pay all of the government imposed costs. That's reality. If you think the wages paid are too small, ask the government to reduce the costs it imposes.

You're missing the point of the actual issue. I'll try to explain it in a way your social conscience can understand.

Unskilled labor, which is what we're discussing, was never meant to provide a "living wage" (whatever the fuck that means) that a man (or woman) was supposed to look to as an answer to the question "How do I raise a family?" Unskilled labor (note: Not low skill, not moderate skill, not transitional) jobs are the bottom of the workforce barrel. They exist in an economy to give workers who have zero marketable skills a place to learn how to be a productive and contributing member to the work force. If you work at a job that ANYONE with a pulse, and IQ above room temperature and 4 hours of training can master, your job falls into the "unskilled labor" category. But for minimum wage laws you would be making LESS than whatever minimum wage pays because ANYONE (this is important) and I mean ANYONE can do your job. You have nothing to offer me that ANYONE else can't be trained to do in less than a shift's worth of work. Mostly because it takes NO skill to do the job.

That there are actually people walking the earth that truly believe simply having the "gumption" to show up somewhere to do a job a trained monkey could accomplish "deserves" a living wage only speaks to the level of "softness" and "entitlement" we, as a society, have bred and embraced.

If your beef is that people who offer "no skill" labor jobs don't really care whether, or not, their employees also suck the government tit then, I'd say your beef is with the availability of the tit, not the employers. McDonald's et al don't *care* about the "livability" of the wage they provide and, frankly, they shouldn't. They are paying *exactly* what the job is worth. This is demonstrated by the fact that those jobs aren't vacant.

I have no degree, no diploma, no technical school and I'm solidly "middle class" in my earnings. Ironically *I* started my "career advancment" march at the gates of McDonald's, like millions of other worker bees before me. I just had the good sense to move the fuck up and along through hard fucking work and study (on my time) when my needs began to exceed my income.

When people say shit to me like "how can you raise a family on the minimum wage!?" my reply is always the same: "You're not supposed to be trying to do that, you fucking fool." If you're dumb enough to get a family before you have a marketable skill, your only real option is to get really fucking good at something really fucking lucrative and do it really fucking quickly. Sometimes hard work is the only medicine for stupid life choices.

Entitlement generation.

I don't care if you've worked full-time at McDonald's for 30 years and never missed a day.  If you aren't making enough money flipping burgers to pay your bills it's time to look for something else.  That's just the way it is.  And if you've backed yourself into a corner with no marketable skills because you chose to flip burgers for 30 years, well, sucks to be you.  Go learn a trade at the local vocational school.  But you're damn sure not worth $15 an hour so good luck getting blood from that stone.

Wawa has no order takers...

One of my favorite short stories.

And there will be less theft and no fucked up orders!

Sounds like a win win to me

this

Actually, you're right on both accounts.

Employee theft at fast food joints usually comes in the form of eating on the line or giving food away to friends. When I ran a pizza shop eating was one of a *very* short list of transgressions that would you fired on the spot, if caught. If you get rid of the order takers you don't have to worry so much about the "friends of theirs" thing either.

Some of those margins are razor thin.

This is the most intelligent and truthful post I have read in a long time.

Precisely.

A minimum-wage job should be looked upon as being a stepping stone to a better-paying job.

If you've chosen a minimum-wage job as your lifetime career, you've chosen poorly.

Where does a person find the time to do that? They are already working 3 part time jobs so they can make the 8hrs a day every day minimum cited above, that gets them a place to live. Now you say there are 16 other hours in a day but remember these a part time jobs so odds are you work 4hrs in the morning a 4 hr break break then a different job for 4 hrs.  And you never know when during the day those hours will fall good luck fitting any form of training in with that. Where do they find the money and time to get training?

You grew up in a world where an hour of work would fill your tank a second would pay for the night out with your girlfriend. I am more then 4 hrs in before I fill my 12 gal tank.