Fast Food workers declare minimum wage "unlivable"

And you probably don't get minimum wage now or at any time in the recent past.

It's not always that simple. If the problem isn't your apartment but your area (say, you live somewhere expensive), who's going to pay for the movers? Are you just going to leave your furniture and everything there? What's your transportation? Do you have a new job lined up in the new area? It's not as easy as you make it out to be, and moving costs a lot of money - if they had money, they wouldn't be in that situation. I quite like John Cheese's take on it:

Being poor kinda sucks.

Actually, a lot of the country is simply stuck below the poverty line, with very few prospects of escaping. It's a fairly fundamental problem, and I'm not going to pretend that raising the minimum wage is our silver bullet solution - it clearly isn't, and it's barely a stopgap. But I am just so sick of this "I made it, you can too" attitude. No, it's not that simple. Not even close. If/when I do manage to score a solid IT job, I understand that it's not just because I was such a smart, talented, exceptional person - I'm smart, but I'm not that smart. I recognize that I had a lot of help that a lot of other people simply wouldn't have. Things like old friends willing to rent me an apartment in Munich for about 60% the going rate. Things like a grandmother willing to help me out with a not insubstantial college fund. Things like my dad hiring me for his stoneworking job despite the fact that I'm not the fittest in "lugging rocks around". And it's things like this that get lost along the way.

 

I didn't mean just the minimum wage, I meant government coercion in general, as well as the ever-present factor of individual will.

There's nothing different from a business perspective between the land in the United States and the land in China - a factory will do well on either given constant conditions in government policies and individual attitudes. My point is, businesses are in it for the bottom line, and the minimum wage hurts that bottom line. Regardless of state policies trying to restrict them, free market principles remain as a simple fact of nature. Businesses might not be able to seek competition in labor within nations, but they're inarguably able to do so internationally. That's exactly what they're doing.

The other factor, besides government policy, is 'individual policy'. In the United States most people aren't willing to work for $2 an hour. In China a lot of people are. There's nothing wrong with this - why force Americans to work when they don't want to? Why force Chinese not to work when they've made the free decision that the opportunity provided by the business is better than their alternatives?

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Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of corporations. Limited liability, state subsidies, and other state-provided privileges. Most of the problems with corporations are caused by government policies. The rest aren't so much the fault of corporations, but the preferences of individuals. You can't restrict the activity of the corporations on these issues without restricting the liberty of people generally. I choose non-coercive methods such as choosing to buy at small businesses. That said, I absolutely recognize the right of others to do otherwise.

 

Can I cut you some straw for the argument you are attempting to build?

 

I was on minimum wage a year ago. Wasn't much fun, but that doesn't mean I wanted to coerce higher wages out of my employer. If someone else was willing to pay me more I would have gone to them, and in fact I did. I'm now working a respectable job with good wages. I was able to obtain this opportunity because of my prior work experience. No doubt once I obtain my law degree I'll move onto even more profitable work.

Only 5.2% of wage paid-workers (or around 2% of total workers) earn minimum wage or less. 23% of teenagers earned it, but only 3% of adults. Given that teenagers are vastly outnumbered by adults (5 years of teenagers vs 55 years of adults), it seems that the vast majority of minimum wage earners aren't working it for life. Quite the opposite, as you gain skills at a minimum wage job greater opportunities with higher wages become open to you.

 

Can't say much more than has already been said. Minimum wage is not intended to be "livable." Why should stocking shelves or flipping burgers pay enough to live off of? Those are not jobs for adults raising families. They're jobs for high school and college kids to get introduced to the workplace or make money on the side. If you had kids while working a basic fast food job, or can't live within your means, then you have severely screwed up. Don't turn that around and try to blame your employer for your own bad decisions.

I'm not going to say something like "I made it, you can too." Instead, I'm going to point out that most people seem unable to find ways to cut and eliminate costs. Everyone keeps throwing around $700+ as a cost for rent. I'm in a relatively well-to-do suburb and rent for a two-bedroom apartment here is about $850 a month. That means you get a roommate to cut the cost in half. Now you're splitting most of the bills, which alone pretty much turns minimum wage into something you can easily live with. That includes putting some money away in savings.

Surviving on minimum wage when single is not difficult throughout most of the country. You just have to be willing to live in a way that fits with you income.

 

I'm supporting a family of 5 on three incomes. I was making $24 an hour when I got laid off. Now I can't even get a minimum wage job. Now days people have to live on minimum wage.

 

Doesn't matter if they do.
Like you said, you get what you pay for, and McDonald's paying minimum wage is working just fine.
Evidence being the "over a billion hamburgers sold"... so far.
Everyone of them... cooked the same.

 

Thanks to YouTube's ability to make people famous.... they're already spitting in your food.

 

What a glib comment. Commute? Most do, by subway or bus. But it's not cheap, and then you have a problem with public transportation not serving blighted areas of the cities (where you might be able to find affordable housing). Move? That costs money and you have to have a job to go to. We are talking about a group of people who are worried about where their next meal is coming from, have no access to credit, do not have bank accounts, do not have a car or a drivers license.

 

Tell that to highly qualified technology workers who are being replaced by foreign workers who are being brought in for half of what they are making. Conservatives won't be happy until the vast majority of workers in this nation are working at the same wage rates as those in Bangladesh, and the average american's living standard is as low.

 

Once again.

Who ever told you that you are entitled to a "decent living", what ever that means, simply by holding down a job lied to you.

 

When I entered the workforce I did, and realized very quickly that the minimum wage isn't going to provide the quality of life that I desired... so I joined the military and went to college.

 

You say that minimum wage should provide a decent standard of living, and I ask how much it should be, and you say I am building a straw man argument?

Typical

 

Min. wage, like everything else, should be a state issue.... not federal.

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No wonder kids can't get jobs anymore.

 

This...

Then this...

ffs.

 

I noticed that too. It made no sense.

Some people would rather complain about everyone else's comments.... instead of contributing anything worthwhile.

 

It does matter otherwise they wouldn't be striking for better wages and benefits.

In most cases, yes, except for the ones they spit on before wrapping it up to give to the public. You get what you pay for right?

 

No it doesn't matter.
You said McDonald's gets what it pays for, which is a minimally skilled employee, and that is all it needs to make billions and billions of dollars.

What the ones whining about it think... doesn't matter.

Those strikers are incredibly easy to replace.
Depending on the temperament of some of the franchisees..... no doubt plenty of them will be.

MSM is drooling for it to happen.

Not most case... all cases
They put a burger on a grill and push a button. When the buzzer goes off, they turn it over. Cooked the same, every time.
And these are the people claiming they're worth $15/hr.

I would never eat there.
They are already spitting on your food... hope you're enjoying it.

 

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I still haven't had one single person adequately explain to me why they don't believe that the minimum wage should be adjusted for inflation.

Now bear in mind that I am NOT talking about the crazy notion of $15 or $20 an hour. That's just too much, but at the same time I believe most understand that removing the minimum wage altogether isn't a solution either, so by reasons of deduction we should all agree that it needs to be set SOMEWHERE, so my question is where and why not in line with inflation? Simple math tells us that if minimum wage raised equal to inflation since 1965 it would be at $9.27 an hour.

That certainly sounds like a reasonable amount to me.

 

People have jobs to earn a living no matter how much fun you have demeaning those who do not meet your expectations. Jobs are supposed to provide you with income that is capable of sustaining one's existence. If society has grown to the idiocy level that an honest days work doesn't deserve an honest days pay, then we are in much more trouble than anything we have thought before.

And it is the governments fault that schools are not up to standard, it's their baby and they are wasting more money than achieving results, and the rich, well they control the government, so they indeed assume some if not most of the responsibility. As individuals everybody has their own cross to bear, for mistakes they make or for not having the insight to understand that they are inevitably responsible for themselves, but if you are one of the nearly 50% walking around with a high school diploma and haven't got the intelligence to fill out a job application, you were have been played/conned by the best government corporate money can buy. AKA, the plutocracy.

 

Do you mean full-time? Any part-time job shouldn't be living wage. But any full-time job should be.

 

How is flipping burgers any less of a job than sewing shoes in the Pacific island countries for ten cents a day? How is it less of a job than harvesting rice in China, or mining gold in Africa?

This conceited looking down our noses at people who work as hard as anyone else, just at a job we think is "inferior" and therefore they don't deserve a living wage is barbaric. It's the sweatshop mentality incorporated into our own society, while the rich get richer off the labor of people who have to continue to live in poverty.

A job is a job, and your superiority complex doesn't justify exploitation.

 

Nobody is saying that it does, but at the same time, you don't get to dictate market wages and still have those jobs.

If we did what you want us to do, here's what will happen.

1. Many of those jobs will simply go away. We have robots, self scanning checkouts, and the like. All of which are cheaper than $10 an hour, let alone $15 an hour, not even counting taxes and benefits and labor regulations.

2. What jobs remain at those stores will be Part Time only. again, to save money the companies are not going to spend. And to avoid Obamacare. We're doing so NOW, with minimum wage at $7.25.

3. Even those part-time jobs (and you'll need two and no benefits for you), will be temp jobs. Permenent employment at $10 an hour is not workable. So these people will only have these jobs for 3-5 months at a time, or work as day-labor where you never know from day to day whether you'll make any money.

So it's not so much that I think burger flipping is not a "real job" but that you're ignoring market realities when you suggest raising the minimum wage.

 

The idiot would be to one that assumes that they know better than the worker who accepts the job and the person accessing how much his business can pay for the work preformed. The idiot assumes that all work is worth at least $X.xx but it isn't.

The minimum wage has created ceilings that cause good workers to suffer because the poor workers have to be paid the same amount as the good. It is our little communist community training ground that tells our not so smart and not very skilled that they should make as much as all other workers no matter how slow they move of how many times they have to be shown how to mop the floor. What that does is quickly cause the good workers to slow down too.
Let's say that if you have ten low wage workers and have to pay them a total to $100.00 per hour. If you could ration that money in accordance to production rates some would make $12.00 per hour and others would make $9.00. Most liberals would make $8.00.

 

Dude, people just like to look down their noses at people LOL. On another board I post at I posted some things about my family and people were like "your dad is just a mechanic" LOL that "just a mechanic" owns his own business and grosses around $120K a year and somehow managed to put 3 kids through college without a single student loan or pel grant.

So it isn't even about money. Internet jackasses just like to try to make themselves feel better by clowning on others, the saddest part is those who behave the worst are no doubt the biggest losers on the board sitting in mommies basement eating cheetos talking about how minimum wage employees are losers LOL