Just a heads up. The some of the fast food workers ( and activists) are planning a strike for May 15th. It seems to be mostly bigger markets. They are asking for $15.00 an hour and a union. What a world. It wasn't much but an inconvenience when they did their walkout thing in Milwaukee a few months ago. It did close some McD's for the day though.


[consumerist.com]

What a world where you are born into a wealthy family, use that cash to throw around and get in excess of millions to billions in return... Hey, everyone is trying to feed their family.

The unions seem to have fewer and fewer members as the years go on so they are looking for more members. Do they tell you how much of the $15 would be union dues?

The wages won't get raised to $15 because the prices of the food would sky rocket to unaffordable for the target market. No more $1 menu.

A CNA who is caring for elderly patients at a nursing home is lucky to get $10 an hour, at a private pay only facility, they may top out after years of experience at $15 in this area. That is a huge responsibility for very little pay. The entire wage system is crazy. Equitable pay for degree of responsibility would be a great thing. I am so tired of seeing jobs which pay in the $8.50 to $10 category needing a least 2 years of schooling! I even saw a job posting that required an applicant to be an English major to sell books at $10.50! How will they ever be able to pay for their schooling at a job that pays that poorly? I have considered going back to school to get training for a new field, but I don't think in the time left I plan on working, I would ever get a student loan paid off. As a woman " of a certain age", my age is a huge factor in hiring. I am over qualified for most of things I am applying for, but the age thing is always there. Do I think fast food is worth $15 an hour? Not in this area. It is an entry level job, with no skill required to walk in the door. This is a learning job, one that a person can build skills and experience as they learn , then they can decide what they want to do. Do they love cooking? They can move in that direction. Love customer interaction? They can go into customer service or waitressing. In the wealthier neighborhoods McD's does pay $11.00 from the postings I have seen. Fast food has always been a field where you move on to bigger and better things. There is good money to be made as you move on to better restaurants. My son was working as a buss boy and was pulling down $100+ a night on Fridays and Saturdays. Not bad for a 17 year old. But he hustled his butt off doing his job and added things like clearing up after each course, filling water and bread baskets and freed the waitresses to get more patrons through. The waitresses split their tips with him, so it was a win, win for everyone.
Fast food is not a field I could ever do, but there are people with major skills doing a lot harder work for less than $15 an hour. Like mystery shoppers.
I've had to work hard for every nickel I have ever made, in some horrid jobs. ( Ever shovel pigeon crap out of a bridge counter weight on a hot day? Find a dead body floating in the river on the way out to your job site?) Nobody ever gave me anything but a chance to work.

You may disagree with their request, but still can't blame them for trying to get more pay. A lot of other professions, including all the ones you mentioned, should get more pay as well. I literally live amongst millionaires and one billionaire lives 45 minutes from me, and the majority of them barely lifts a finger.

Seattle just raised their minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour
and they did it with the support of big business. If it works
there once fully implemented expect to see it quickly
cascade nationwide.

Techman01, IIRC, that wage increase was limited to the SEATAC Airport business park.

No James, the whole city just raised it
this week. That airport thing was last year.

Also, waiters and waitresses will be paid
15 an hour too, no more lower wage
for tips. I wonder if they will still expect tips.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/08/2014 04:17PM by techman01.

If it is in the airport area, it is probably because they are having a problem getting US citizens that they do not fail the drug test. Some of the airports had to contract with HR companies that brought foreigners from African countries and places like Ukraine and Romania but they could only have them stay for max 4 months, but the TSA has become more restrictive lately so they had to find other solutions to get non-drug users US citizens or green card holders.

Could explain why I have been receiving phone calls all day for a fast food shop. I was told it had to be done by the 11th. I had two bonused shops given to me on Tuesday without any kind of dickering. I thought it odd that they would bonus shops so early in the month.

I can never blame someone for asking for higher wages. They might not get them, but at least they are standing up for something instead of just facebooking about it, right?

When I was a kid, McJobs were indeed entry level. I got my first documented gig washing dishes when I was 14. Many of the grown-ups in my town worked in the local factories: furniture, clothing, pianos, and food processing. The mill closed when the train stopped passing through, the owner of the clothing factory shipped the jobs off to Bangladesh, and the furniture factories eventually closed as cheap imports were more attractive to the average consumer than the locally made wares. There is still a turkey plant, but most of the other manufacturing jobs are gone.

With the higher-paying manufacturing jobs disappearing, we are seeing more people trying to support a family with the traditionally lower paying, service jobs. We did this to ourselves by not supporting local manufacturing.

[Wow. That needed editing. There is a reason I fill out my reports after the kids go to bed.]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/09/2014 02:46AM by heartlandcanuck.

Good points, Heartland. Higher wages mean more spending and that benefits everyone.

cindy55 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> A CNA who is caring for elderly patients at a
> nursing home is lucky to get $10 an hour, at a
> private pay only facility, they may top out after
> years of experience at $15 in this area.

I agree with you completely...there are so many jobs requiring some intellect and even experience that pay less...I have a friend working for minimum wage running the babysitting room at the local Y. she has 6-8 kids at a time, mostly toddlers. Her entire salary goes to health insurance. No vacation, sick etc.. I know bookkeepers and such with $12, book store employees who have to be well read for $10..my daughter worked at a high end restaurant as a server for $2.25 or so an hour in a state with a smaller min wage. She hustled her butt and had to dress and actually be a college grad for that job. Her wages with tips came to less than Mc would pay. So what happens to all those people with experience and degrees earning less than $15. Suddenly a job at McD pays better than a college degree job??? Huh?

Let me tell you something, y'all who are complaining about this.

I worked for a company for two years. I was an assistant manager, so I worked 40 hours a week and if someone had a problem on the job at 2am, I was the one who got the phone call (for emergencies, you called the manager; for "I can't figure out how to use the invoice gun and the Coke guy just got here" you called me . . . once at 4am, ON CHRISTMAS, an hour after my mom and I put the ham in the oven and went to bed). When I left, do you know what I was making?

$9.75 an hour.

No benefits.

Here's some of what I was expected to do:

--Clean gas pumps in 100+ temperatures; this job took 2-3 hours
--Deal with our transient population (many were harmless but many were not; in one case, I had a knife pulled on me after I told a man to leave the store because he was hustling for his hooker girlfriend outside)
--Monitor for theft
--Handle cigarette populations to prevent theft and cigarette robberies (yes, those are a thing)
--Monitor and sell liquor, including on third shift
--Train other employees
--Know how to detect and reject stolen credit cards and counterfeit money
--Know how to detect and reject false IDs for liquor, cigarettes, and skin mags and DVDs
--Come in on days the manager was out of town if I got a phone call that someone needed help (Christmas? Yup, missed half the holiday because I was dealing with some stuck-up snot who thought she shouldn't have to pay for gas.)


All of this is in addition to cleaning the store, stocking, and running a register. I tried for that entire two years to find a better job; if my mom hadn't let me sleep in her spare room, I would literally have starved. I was pulling down $300/week after taxes.


Would you do all of the above for less than ten bucks an hour, all the time knowing that any moment, any hour, someone could walk in with a gun and demand your money, cigarettes, liquor? Knowing that in another store in your chain a female employee was just sexually assaulted at gunpoint behind the counter? Knowing that if you were physically attacked and you defended yourself you could be fired?


Oh, you wouldn't?


SO WHY DO YOU THINK WE SHOULDN'T RAISE THE MINIMUM WAGE?

I would never work that job, thus avoiding all of those problems or situations.

Kudos that you are able to do that!!

If the minimum wage had been raised to keep pace with inflation it would be around $10.70. What seems to be another problem is many of those workers do not get a raise unless the minimum wage is increased. To me that is crazy. While most jobs at that level are meant to be entry level and a stepping stone to other jobs there are still two issues. First, as heartland canuck pointed out, there are not other jobs. Second, if someone continues in a job and proves to be a valuable worker a good business should be rewarding them for their skills and longevity, not waiting until they are forced to pay them more. It is downright incorrigible for some of those businesses to also be the ones most often participating in wage theft.

For all the gloom and doom about what it will do to businesses who may not be able to afford to keep as many workers, what about the other side of the coin? It seems workers who have money to spend will stimulate the economy and in turn create more jobs. Maybe we need to make an effort to be sure that job creation occurs here, not India, Bangladesh, China or the Philippines, by voting with our feet.

Some think that ppl at McD should not be paid more because more difficult jobs are paid less. Those ppl are missing the point. All jobs need to be paid more, including the ones at McD and those nursing homes... And yes, that also means the CEO would have to make less.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/09/2014 04:39AM by LindaM.

Yes Linda, I understand your point and I get your point but the fact is they are asking that fast food, and only fast food get raised to $15 an hour. Those that are protesting in that type of job are not asking that the minimum wage be raised for all, they are asking that it be raised only if you work in a fast food restaurant. That is the part I do not agree with. Those people asking for the minimum wage to be raised to above $10 an hour are talking across the board, not just one job. I can get behind that. Nina mason would get a 25 cents an hour raise then.
Where I live, the minimum wage for someone working in a hotel on the ocean side of the street get a minimum wage $4 or so an hour more than in a similar hotel right across the street and also facing the ocean. And those places are generally pricey too. I cannot understand this wage structure at all.

They aren't asking for a minimum wage hike for fast food; they are trying a strike to demand that their own employers, owners of fast food restaurants, pay more.

I'm for an across the board hike, not one that unfairly favors one set of workers over another. I see no reason FF workers are more deserving than anyone else.

Do teachers' unions strike for higher nurses' pay? Sometimes when a group is represented by a union, other members of the union will show support even if they are in another industry. These folks are trying to demand that their own employers pay them more, and the happen to work in fast food. They are not represented by a union, nor are they covered in any sort of collective bargaining agreement. While a raise in minimum wage across the board seems more fair, these people are not asking for a minimum raise hike. They are only asking for their own pay, and for people in jobs like theirs. It is a risky game to play and there will likely be some unemployed people on the 16th.

You think they should picket for the hotel employees?? The hotel employees should and can very well do the same.

sandyf Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yes Linda, I understand your point and I get your
> point but the fact is they are asking that fast
> food, and only fast food get raised to $15 an
> hour. Those that are protesting in that type of
> job are not asking that the minimum wage be raised
> for all, they are asking that it be raised only if
> you work in a fast food restaurant. That is the
> part I do not agree with. Those people asking for
> the minimum wage to be raised to above $10 an hour
> are talking across the board, not just one job. I
> can get behind that. Nina mason would get a 25
> cents an hour raise then.
> Where I live, the minimum wage for someone working
> in a hotel on the ocean side of the street get a
> minimum wage $4 or so an hour more than in a
> similar hotel right across the street and also
> facing the ocean. And those places are generally
> pricey too. I cannot understand this wage
> structure at all.

Let's just solve the problem like this:

Nobody needs to make more money in a year than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime.

Many CEOs make upward of $5 000 000 per year (and that's on the LOW end) while telling their employees to "Break food into small pieces so you eat more slowly and will feel full sooner" (from a McD's employee handout) or to donate food to help their coworkers who cannot afford food (Walmart).

Dock the CEOs' pay and pay a living wage and maybe our economy would get out of this death spiral it's in. Funny how easy that is!

And if consumers supported this idea and made a point to spend their dollars with companies that pay employees a living wage, those CEOs would take notice.

Canuck: the sad thing is, there aren't many. I do try to make a point of going to Trader Joe's and Walmart's been on my boycott list for so long that I'm looking for stuff for a new apartment and when someone linked me to walmart.com backspacing out was automatic.

Shareholders of some major corporations are starting to put on the pressure regarding out of control salaries for the top executives.

Back in the day before Ben and Jerry sold out, the story was they capped their own salaries at 10X the amount of their lowest paid employee. Now that is incentive to keep pay your employees well. Since they are the ones that shouldered the risk of starting the business they certainly deserved a great return.

Anheuser-Busch was always one of the top employers here. The executives were paid well, the family has been wealthy and they still provided some of the highest pay, best benefits and best working conditions. There were lines out the door to try and get a job there.

It's like what we do with MS...if you don't think the job is worth the pay, don't take it.

I know it's not that simple. This is repetitious but...why should minimum wage be raised but no one else has received a 30% raise?! As for the "wealthy", keep in mind that some of those people did earn the right to be paid that much by working up the ladder or by having the skill set to keep the business running.

While I was on a much smaller scale than a CEO, I hated hearing my employees make comments about my salary or what do I do. They would complain that I was in my office while they had to answer phones and do tasks. Little did they know that I ran the business from payroll and paying bills to doing reports and capex. I kept it profitable so they could even have a job.

I recognize that there are positions within a corporate structure which should pay significantly more and don't begrudge those with the abilities to command high salaries. That doesn't change the fact there is a level that becomes obscene when the lion's share of the other employee's are having their pay cut while asked to do more work.

As to minimum wage, had there been moderate, consistent increases all these years it would already be at or close to $10.70 an hour.

Actually, Lisa, if minimum wage had kept pace with inflation and work requirements of a given job (i.e. requirements have actually increased over the years), it would currently be . . .


$23 an hour.


Yeah. So asking for a $10 or $12 minimum wage is not out of line at all. If you can afford to make $100 million per year in bonuses for yourself on top of your seven-digit salary, you can damn well afford to pay the people who made that money for you.


To add to the list of cool companies, Nintendo execs this year are choosing to slash their own bonuses and pay because the Wii U has underperformed. Their reasoning: "We chose to make and market this product. Our employees only did what we asked, and so we, not they, must be responsible for the marketing decisions that led the console to underperform." Lower-level employees will see no decrease in their pay or bonuses.

You need to do some research. Minimum wage had the most buying power in the late 60's. To have kept pace it would currently be $10.70. Sorry, but I'm not buying into any entry level position paying the equivalent of $48,000 a year.