McDonalds helps it's employees budget! (Irony)

[Guardsman Bass]

There are a fair number of states that have a higher minimum wage than the federal one here in the US too: Chart. Washington has the highest at $9.19/hour. Some cities go beyond that and have higher minimum wages as well, like San Francisco's $10.55/hr.

[Jub]

True as that is the base minimum wage can set the bar pretty low and some states will stay as close as possible to that bottom bar while also being right to work states with no safety net. I'll still take Canada, New Zealand, or Australia over the US for that reason.

[Borgholio]

Just read last night about protests targeting fast food chains for not having a higher minimum wage. Protesters are asking for a wage increase from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour. For flipping burgers.

While I understand that its hard to feed a family on minimum wage, I wasn't under the impression that flipping burgers was the kind of high-skill / education job where one should expect to be able to feed a family on. Maybe things have changed since I was 16, but my first job was at McDonalds...and I had no expectations that the job would ever be a career. It was a summer job to earn some spending cash, that's all.

[xthetenth]

There are only so many jobs that can be not a career but instead a way to earn some spending cash. It looks a lot like we've gone way past the point of having too many of them and too few jobs to earn a livable wage.

[Borgholio]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

[Mr Bean]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

To be blunt a skilled tech support person should be earning 23$-29$ an hour and would be twenty years ago at an equivalent position then. It's a long running issue that improvements in efficacy stopped being passed to the worker decades ago.

It used to be if you had 50 employees working for a 10$ an hour but thanks to tech investments you reduced your headcount to 25 people doing the work it used to take 50. In the old days you payed yourself part and the 25 now got 15$-18$ an hour with you taking the rest. Now tech has improved to the point 10$ can do the work of 50 but still get payed the 10$ and you take the 40$

[KlavoHunter]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

So if the burger-flippers' strike succeeds in earning them a living wage, then why can't the techies then go on strike, after seeing their success, to get an increased wage commiserate with their level of education and skill?

[Wing Commander MAD]

There's also fewer jobs for unskilled labor today, despite there being more people, especially in the wake of automation and the death of manufacturing. Hell, a degree doesn't necessarily even help if there are no positions in your field, and I'm sure having a degree doesn't necessarily help with getting a position in an unrelated field like it used to. More than likely the only difference between a college grad and high school grad for most unskilled positions is that one has a ton of debt and the other likely doesn't.

Also, keep in mind that you're going to be hard-pressed to raise a family even on $15.00/hr without additional income and it should be downright impossible on the current wage without additional sources of income. The Daily Show had an excellent segment on this recently. I don't eat fast food often, but I can't tell you the last time I saw a teenager working at a fast food joint.

[Borgholio]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

So if the burger-flippers' strike succeeds in earning them a living wage, then why can't the techies then go on strike, after seeing their success, to get an increased wage commiserate with their level of education and skill?

Hmm...should start plotting...

[Simon_Jester]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

To be blunt a skilled tech support person should be earning 23$-29$ an hour and would be twenty years ago at an equivalent position then. It's a long running issue that improvements in efficacy stopped being passed to the worker decades ago.

It used to be if you had 50 employees working for a 10$ an hour but thanks to tech investments you reduced your headcount to 25 people doing the work it used to take 50. In the old days you payed yourself part and the 25 now got 15$-18$ an hour with you taking the rest. Now tech has improved to the point 10 can do the work of 50 but still get payed the 10$ and you take the 40$

I condemn this development, but I can sort of see where it came from. I think.

Labor is a huge part of the expenses of a lot of modern businesses, so the easiest way to cut costs is often to use automation to remove part of your workforce. But it defeats the purpose of doing that if you then proceed to raise the salary of the remaining employees accordingly. So the company either keeps the profits (sometimes) or passes it on to the customer by lowering prices, or at least not raising them as things get more expensive.

If all businesses worked this way it would tend to cancel itself out; it would effectively mean low inflation as seen by the consumer/employee. But some sectors don't work that way, because of the String Quartet Effect.* These sectors have more or less constant labor costs over time, in constant dollars, because advancing technology doesn't let a professional in the sector create more product per hour of their time.

As a result, services like legal services, medicine, and education keep getting more expensive relative to the salary of the workers in other fields.

---

*I couldn't find a link for this. The oversimplified form of the idea is that if you look at many professions (like medicine, law, and string quartets), what is really being sold is not a product, it's the labor of an individual. To get one hour of live performance from a string quartet, you must hire four musicians to work for one hour, no way around it.

Since the professional cannot give you two man-hours of work with only one hour of actual time, there is little or no way for changing technology to improve the quantity of their product. Therefore, the price of the product will tend to remain uniform in constant dollars, because the professional has to eat.

This contrasts to industries that manufacture goods, where advancing technology reduces the constant-dollar price of the same product, or lets you get a better product for the same price.



This is an oversimplification, and technology sometimes does allow a professional to serve significantly more clients. However, this is usually accompanied by a drastic drop in the quality of service.

The musicians can record a song and let people play it back for pennies or less on the dollar, and effectively produce thousands of man-hours of music with four man-hours of playing. The cost, of course, is that now you're putting up with canned music instead of a live performance. The price of recordings may drop with advancing technology, therefore- but the price of actually hiring a string quartet in constant dollars probably can't.



Observing this effect, we see that it is going to be very pronounced in sectors where the normal mode involves a trained specialist spending a fixed amount of time working on someone's problems, and where technology doesn't make the process take (much) less time.

Doctors, for example, can only visit X patients a day, regardless of how advanced medical technology gets, unless we invent something like Star Trek tricorders. Lawyers must work a more or less fixed number of hours per case. Educators have to stand in front of a room of students and present information, and you can't really increase the number of students taught per man-hour of educator time, without reducing the quality of the product (the students' education). And, potentially, further raising costs by forcing you to hire more assistants to help teach a class, when doing this at the college level.

So no wonder that medicine and education fail to get cheaper in constant dollars as time goes on!

This does not explain everything, and it has limits, but I think it is a force worth considering in how wages are determined in a modern economy.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

The entire purpose of the minimum wage when it was passed was so that one person could support a family with one full-time job, no matter what. And while fast food services are still often seen as part-time work for people who are doing other things with their time, the reality is the average fast food worker is an adult and a breadwinner. So if your real worries are that it will make other jobs less better than working fast food, you're putting your own pride over the livelihood of millions. Great job.

[ray245]

Why is so many people that dependent on fast food restaurant as their full time employers in US?

[K. A. Pital]

If that's true, I wouldn't be able to help but be a bit insulted that a burger-flipper can earn $15 per hour and a skilled tech support position at a medical firm can only earn $18 per hour. That would mean it's not worth the effort to get an education or go through rigorous training for only $3 per hour more.

Why? Did you choose your job to feel yourself superior to others, or did you choose it because you like it? A burger-flipper's job is hell.

In a society with more or less equal earnings people would choose jobs on the basis of their personal preferences and desires, not because the Rat Race makes one job a lot more rewarding than the other job which is just as necessary.

[Metahive]

Borgholio, are you honestly expressing jealousy towards fast food clerks over $3? How about all those top-managers who make millions in a year without actually doing work that's worth a million $ of effort, get golden parachutes even when they screw up and then proceed to either hoard the money or use it to bribe corrupt politicians to calcify their social advantages?

No, hate on the little people instead because they might actually earn a living at a job you have only contempt for (although I bet you'll still eat there).

Fuck it, I hate this attitude of petty jealousy more than anything, it's why the fat cats get away with everything.

[Borgholio]

I wouldn't call it jealousy. Let's put it this way. I put in all sorts of effort at my current job to get (what I consider) to be a fair wage for my work. If someone can perform far less skilled labor and get paid the same, how is that fair? I agree that a minimum wage should ideally provide a livable income, but at the same time, a wage should reflect the amount of skill, education, intelligence, and effort that goes into the job. Unlike the fat cat millionaire managers you mentioned, both the burger-flipper and I work for a living. I just think the difference in pay rates should reflect the types of jobs we do.

[Jub]

Who the fuck cares about 'fair'? I would rather see people earn a living wage doing a job that is, by all accounts, totally shitty to work in. You go to school and work hard to get a better job and that doesn't just mean a higher base wage, that means better conditions, better commute, benefits, work hours, etc.

[Metahive]

If you earn enough to live comfortably, why does it matter? Would you consider becoming a fast food clerk if their pay was only minimally beneath yours? Be very careful in how you answer this question.

[K. A. Pital]

I wouldn't call it jealousy. Let's put it this way. I put in all sorts of effort at my current job to get (what I consider) to be a fair wage for my work. If someone can perform far less skilled labor and get paid the same, how is that fair? I agree that a minimum wage should ideally provide a livable income, but at the same time, a wage should reflect the amount of skill, education, intelligence, and effort that goes into the job. Unlike the fat cat millionaire managers you mentioned, both the burger-flipper and I work for a living. I just think the difference in pay rates should reflect the types of jobs we do.

The fat cat millionaire manager is still hired. He has an enmous wage, plain and simple.

Did you pay to automate all low-skill jobs, so that people are never subjected to mentally limiting, repeating and physically draining heavy labour? I have not heard about this.

What about high-risk physical labour? They are often paid above the average wage in societies with a history of labour struggle and workplace safety rules. Are you also going to argue their wages have to be depressed since they do not actually reflect an expensive Yale education or whatever?

What sort of classist crap is that?

[Metahive]

Having a better education usually means you can pick from a wider variety of jobs and have therefore a better bargaining chip vis-a-vis your employer. People who work at a fast food joint are most often disadvantaged in that area. Who are you, Borgholio, to tell them that despite doing a job that they probably didn't dream for and toiling away under crappy circumstances they don't deserve to earn a living wage just because it would hurt your precious ego? Your privilge, it reeks.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I wouldn't call it jealousy. Let's put it this way. I put in all sorts of effort at my current job to get (what I consider) to be a fair wage for my work. If someone can perform far less skilled labor and get paid the same, how is that fair? I agree that a minimum wage should ideally provide a livable income, but at the same time, a wage should reflect the amount of skill, education, intelligence, and effort that goes into the job. Unlike the fat cat millionaire managers you mentioned, both the burger-flipper and I work for a living. I just think the difference in pay rates should reflect the types of jobs we do.

This line of argument assumes that a raise in unskilled wages to $15 / hr would have no effect on technicians' ability to negotiate a wage higher than $18 / hr, which is now close to the minimum (and both of which are far lower than in the past on an inflation-adjusted basis). The assumption strikes me as ridiculous.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Why is so many people that dependent on fast food restaurant as their full time employers in US?

Because so many of the good jobs (in manufacturing and the like) have been outsourced to third-world nations, where corporations can get away with paying slave wages for skilled and semi-skilled labor, in conditions that would be illegal in the US, leaving the workers to compete for the ever-dwindling scraps of whatever's left. All in the name of corporate profits, which then get passed on to upper management.

[Zaune]

Why is so many people that dependent on fast food restaurant as their full time employers in US?

Because between increasing automation and the availability of more sweatshop-friendly countries overseas, there's fuck-all else to do for a living if you don't have the money and the smarts to get yourself a bachelor's degree or some sort of impressive professional certification.

[Broomstick]

Even with a bachelor's degree you no longer have a guarantee of greater than minimum wage jobs, not these days.

[Zaune]

I know, but at least it elevates you to merely average rather than not even worth noticing, and maybe gets you a foot in the door if your major's in something vocational like chemistry or nursing... if your parents didn't change all the locks the day after you moved into your dorm*, and you can therefore maybe afford to spend a couple of years in indentured servitude an unpaid internship to pad out your resume.

* This actually happened to me.

[spaceviking]

I am surprised that people consider 3$ an hour wage difference insignificant. I make a little less than $3 more than I did last year at my summer job, I feel a lot more financially comfortable going back to school.