OP - The fast food worker's revolution

[Broomstick]

Nice answer, and in a way you have shown part of the problem. Your minimum standard of living included high speed internet and a cellphone. I am not saying they shouldn't be there but one can live without both.

At present in the US subsidized cell phone service is available to people under the poverty line (which people earning minimum wage definitely are). So one can have a cell phone at no cost to oneself although the minutes are limited. Some internet access could be had over such a phone but again, time would be limited.

Most public libraries these days provide free internet access with no means testing - I've occasionally gone to the local library to surf the web over my lunch hour. So, again, internet access can be had without cost at least in some locations.

[Broomstick]

Service work is hard. Even back at the library I would have been willing to take a pay cut to be able to sit in an office and deal with papers and computers and other professionals instead of the public. Maybe a white collar job requires more contemplation and complex decision making than running at McDonald's, but the latter is much more demanding physically, and probably has more constant stress.

It's also more dangerous.

The current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, didn't lose part of a finger to a paper cut gone wrong he obtained at a desk job, he lost it due to an accident while slicing meat at Arby's (mostly due to post-accident infection). I'd rather not think too hard on the sort of damage hot oil from a deep fryer could do to someone. Kitchens can be dangerous.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

It's also more dangerous.

The current mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel, didn't lose part of a finger to a paper cut gone wrong he obtained at a desk job, he lost it due to an accident while slicing meat at Arby's (mostly due to post-accident infection). I'd rather not think too hard on the sort of damage hot oil from a deep fryer could do to someone. Kitchens can be dangerous.

Its not just kitchens. Think about graveyard shift clerks at a convenience store, they get paid minimum wage, but in some places they're more likely to be murdered on the job than cops. Or pizza delivery drivers, like me, who have similar chances of being robbed/murdered on the job, on top of the dangers of being on the road, in traffic, for hours on end.

When's the last time a corporate CEO got shot over twenty bucks and a stuffed crust? Because that probably happened to a delivery driver somewhere while you were reading this.

[Akhlut]

Nice answer, and in a way you have shown part of the problem. Your minimum standard of living included high speed internet and a cellphone. I am not saying they shouldn't be there but one can live without both.

Access to a phone is fairly necessary to get job offers. This isn't 1930, where the lack of a phone number isn't an enormous strike against you for getting a job.

Internet access is also fairly necessary these days, as it makes banking, job searches, paying bills, and acquiring things as cheap as possible much, much easier. Paying for it at home might be far, far easier than trying to go to the local library (depending on where you live, it might be way too arduous and expensive to go to the "local" library than it is to simply pay for internet access; if one lives in a very rural area or is an hour or two away by public transportation in a larger city, then the time lost and the money used for transportation might meet or exceed prices for internet access).

[Elheru Aran]

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It can be safely argued that the CEO's job is far more than what the average team member does; running a corporation is a very different job from putting together a burger.
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More what? That is a matter that very much annoys me. There is this assumption that working in an office is obviously harder than working in service, but how many CEO's would be able to stand on their feet eight or ten hours a day running back and forth dealing with customers and managers constantly saying hurry, faster, get it out now. Service work is hard. Even back at the library I would have been willing to take a pay cut to be able to sit in an office and deal with papers and computers and other professionals instead of the public. Maybe a white collar job requires more contemplation and complex decision making than running at McDonald's, but the latter is much more demanding physically, and probably has more constant stress.

Not saying they're the same type of job, which was my point. Running a company and making executive decisions with short and long term projections and all that jazz is still work. It's not as physical a form of work as the line employee's, but it's still labor-- the CEO (or middle management or whatever) still has to drive around, talk to people, do paperwork, and assume responsibility for decisions which will affect hundreds or thousands of employees' lives. They're two different types of work.

And bear in mind that the team member just has to clock in, do his job, and go home. From a level not much above the team member on upward, the amount of actual responsibilities increases to where people are working 50, 60+ hour weeks on salaried wages rather than the expected 40. Believe it or not, they aren't just sitting around in air-conditioned offices, putting their feet up and pushing paper around their desks. If the company is publicly traded and doesn't do well, even the higher-ups can lose their jobs if the stockholders or whatever decide they're not helping make the company profit.

Don't get me wrong; I would LOVE it if executives and such would spend a few days every week on the floor with us peons. However, their jobs are in a different category from ours, and you can't necessarily make the blanket statement that they aren't working as hard as the average service employee. Certainly some don't-- once you get into the upper management that probably increases-- but middle and lower management definitely keep busy and earn their pay.

Though I should have made the distinction a little more clear in my post, I suppose...

[Starglider]

And bear in mind that the team member just has to clock in, do his job, and go home. From a level not much above the team member on upward, the amount of actual responsibilities increases to where people are working 50, 60+ hour weeks on salaried wages rather than the expected 40. Believe it or not, they aren't just sitting around in air-conditioned offices, putting their feet up and pushing paper around their desks. If the company is publicly traded and doesn't do well, even the higher-ups can lose their jobs if the stockholders or whatever decide they're not helping make the company profit.

Ignoring compensation, management jobs have benefits and drawbacks but are not radically more or less demanding than frontline service jobs. The difference is skill set; both formal qualifications and the social skills to pass interviews and play office politics for promotion. Compensation is ultimately determined by the rarity of the skillset and the degree to which it correlates with organisational performance; the more pivotal the role, the more money it's worth spending to hire better qualified candidates. Executives are paid highly because there is a high correlation between their skill and profitability and because people with the relevant experience and skills are relatively rare. Both of these perceptions may be somewhat exagerated, but it's undeniably true that most people suck at management.

[Guardsman Bass]

Executives are paid highly because there is a high correlation between their skill and profitability and because people with the relevant experience and skills are relatively rare. Both of these perceptions may be somewhat exagerated, but it's undeniably true that most people suck at management.

It depends on what you define as "performance". CEO pay now tends to have a positive correlation with increasing shareholder value, and there's some evidence that higher CEO pay can lead to higher performance in a number of metrics (particularly Return on Equity).

But I tend to think your second reason matters more. A shitty CEO can do a lot more damage than a shitty engineer or salesman, so companies are much more loathe to part with even decent top-level staff (that's also why you tend to see CEO pay go up when a firm is in crisis mode and everyone else's pay is going down - the CEO is the person most capable of jumping ship and needs to be paid more to stay on). CEO candidates, of course, know this, and can hire a bunch of outside consulting firms to help them get the best pay package possible. And once they're in, it tends to be difficult to topple them unless either the firm really starts tanking, or you've got an activist shareholder going after the board of directors.