I don’t know, I have a feeling people craving fast food would adapt very fast if they had to. They might have just determined that ultimately machines would be more expensive than humans working at $8/hr. Most of the shit made in China and India can be done by machine, but what’s the point if poor people have no choice but to do it for pennies a day?
As for your earlier questions, I might as well stick with the theme of this thread and answer with my own (but really someone else’s, of course) cliche remark that gives me that much-needed sense of superiority: this is SRK and 90% of it is retarded.
Cost of materials has gone up, as has transportation of those materials, that’s directly affected bottom lines, but the majority of cost for most products is labor. Whether it be fast food where meat is pumped out tubes to make the perfectly shaped nuggets, to building buildings (even expensive items, the ‘material cost’ is based around the labor to construct those massive generators/gear packages), to computers (the materials for an iPad aren’t expensive, the cost is absorbed via development, research, growing, and assembly).
To save money - you cut down labor more than anything else. Whether its downsizing and abusing the work force left (my life), outsourcing, etc.
That doesn’t change anything tho in terms of what I said.
Maybe you’re talking about my first couple of sentences that was aimed directly at the field in hand and nothing else? I wasn’t refering to anything outside of FF. The price of goods in general swung with rise in oil cost - it even affected the cost of manufacturing my precious shoes as the oil itself is actually used in the product as well as transporting. But that’s neither here nor there. In FF they want the cost as low as possible, and they’ve done everything they can to lower material cost, horomone injections, fish farming, smaller portions, etc - so the only way for this cost to not come back to the consumer is to keep labor cost low. Is it unfairly low is very debatable - and worth the discussion, but doubling it is so ridiculous that it doesn’t even open the window for ‘negotiations’. And if this is truly about the minimum wage, then they need to treat it as such.
Also another point to be made is how much raising min wage would effect the esteem of a job like mcds. If its 15 an hour then getting hired “to flip burgers” is going to be ALOT harder. Im talking resumes etc. that hoodrat mom with 7 kids and the dumb teen chewing gum wont be working there anymore leaving those people in the same situation as before.
Just accept the fact that you’re a liberal. Even if you wouldn’t have been 40 years ago, in modern America as long as you don’t want to gas all welfare recipients you’re a dirty liberal.
It should be even easier to accept because you’ve been through this before. Remember 10 years ago? “Ok even though I hate atheists because they’re a bunch of gay baby killers, I gotta disagree with…”, and look at your heathen ass now!
The latter, most definitely. socialist undertones too stronk all over the place. Said undertones easy to sell too, because people don’t know (or want to know) crap about economics.
So many pompous comments here about how only dumb, uneducated, irresponsible failures work in fast food and they should be grateful for what they have, or that they’re too old to work minimum wage, and should simply get a better job (!?).
This is maximum scrub. If you’ve never been on the ugly/scary side of industrial action, you have no idea how tough the decision to go to strike is. Do you think they’re just partying on their day off and bullying their employers into giving them money? They’re shitting themselves. These people aren’t refusing to work, they’re refusing to be paid.
Can you imagine, even on a good salary, being mistreated to the point that you could say to your boss “I’m not coming in, dock my pay until this is fixed.” How far would you have to be pushed before you thought this was a reasonable move? Close to getting the gas shut off? Close to getting evicted? Close to starvation? Close to losing your children to the state? You have to understand how extreme the ordeal gets before a strike takes place. These are people, often traveling from way out of town, from poor areas, working long hours, being treated like shit, and then coming home to whatever basic shit they can survive on for YEARS before they realize how dire the situation is. The fact that they don’t even have the right to union representation on top of all that blows my mind. Kinda sad that the first people to be looked at as con-artists here are the working staff that are in such need for help, they’re willing to put themselves at risk.
(Your version of America makes sense, not that other guy’s with the K he didn’t explain, then he put a K in strong, I’m assuming? those really cut into the points he’s making and words he’s saying)
Just going to quote this for truth and add that no one that’s actually going into work and putting in effort deserves to be below the poverty line. That’s just ridiculous, if you’re doing someone’s work for them as a human being at the very least you deserve to be able to cover your basic needs. Shit job or not, it’s a job, the kind of wages people working in fast food in America get is only a step above sweat shops in Africa. Here in Australia you get $500 a fortnight for being a jobseeker out of work, $250 a week for putting in job applications. It might be a shit job that almost anyone can do but that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be paid reasonably for it.
I think you’re taking what folks are saying to far in a single direction tho…
The general thought by several here, and elsewhere for that matter is simply “You shouldn’t be set on flipping burgers”. If that is your only skill, you need to push yourself further. If it’s a shit situation - my wife was thinking about doing fast food before I stopped her (she had lost her job and there was little chance of her finding another due to education budget cuts) - its a shit situation. But the thing about shit situations is that they should be temporary. Speaking outside of management, flipping burgers should NOT be a career. The lady in the article with 3 kids has it rough, no one is taking that from her. But if she’s home all day, she needs to try and find secondary income (again I JUST went thru this - its how I got into flipping toys on eBay) or develop a secondary skill. Easier said than done, hell yeah - I understand that…watching one kid drains the life out of me, 3 would be murderous…but she is never mentioned trying to ‘break the cycle’ - and that’s the part ‘we’ are unsympathetic towards.
She never mentioned trying to move into mangement…
Never mentioned any additional education…
Never mentioned even a goal besides the next day. Making it to the next day can be tough, but you STILL have to think further than that.
As for the Strike itself? I’m on the line - on one hand they are foregoing their current paychecks, but there aren’t long term repercussions. If they get fired, they’ll find their way into the same type of job elsewhere - they won’t get ‘black-balled’.
But it’s still anger pointed in the wrong direction. It SHOULD be about raising minimum wages, and it should be aimed at local politicians so it can build into actually raising minimum wage. They have to realize - especially as grown folks, its a job a teenager who’s hungry for ANY money would be willing to do, so you can want $15 or $18 all you want, so long as their is an equally skilled person willing to do it for half that…you aren’t needed anymore. Raise the minimum wage again and the status quo doesn’t change in terms of your employment competition.
Why are there so many incredibly fucking stupid people posting in here?
Do any of you dumb motherfuckers (at least I hope you are ancestrally motherfuckers - retardation like yours should not happen in a healthy gene pool) ever stop to question what you are told?
I mean, like, ever?
Answer me this, before any of you go off on another mouth-breathing conniption fit: Why does the top 10% deserve to have over 80% of the money?
I never flipped burgers, but when I was in college I held down two part time jobs - one of which was working at a gym. I made like $6.50 or some forgettable shit like that, but I got a free gym membership as my ‘perk’…the money…was barely a bonus heh. The irony was I lost most of my weight playing DDR back then, not going to the gym.
