Posted on 05/21/2015 1:22:43 PM PDT by jfd1776
Reflections on the "minimum wage hike" protests today at McDonald's Oak Brook headquarters...
On a cool May morning, as McDonalds’ shareholders met to determine the fast food giant’s future course, some 2000 protesters, hailing from as far as Kansas City and New York, descended upon them to present a list of demands. Raise the starting wage to $15/hour, they threatened, lest the company be forever branded with such monikers as Exploiter, Villain, Robber Baron and Tyrant!
The Chicago Tribune, newspaper of record in the blighted metro area that McDonald’s calls home, was happy to give front page coverage to these protesters, telling their tale and helpfully spinning the story as favorably for the protestors as any could hope. The days of restricting opinion to the Opinion page are long gone indeed.
The first question may seem fatalist, but it must be asked anyway: Does anyone really believe that if McDonald’s concedes, the left WON’T forever brand McDonald’s with all those nasty monikers? We have seen enough of the way that blackmailers behave throughout the ages to know that capitulation only serves to make the wolves hungrier next time.
But there is more of interest in this story, and it’s all to be found by reading between the lines of the Chicago Tribune’s coverage today.
The Story of Darrell Miller
The helpful propagandists who authored the Tribune’s print article told the tale of Darrell Miller, a 35-year-old minimum wage employee at McDonald’s who travelled from Kansas City to participate. He arrived in a bus filled with protesters, in fact, and looked forward to the chance to “fight for freedom” like Martin Luther King did.
The curious reader will ask questions.
How can a minimum wage worker afford the time off work, and afford the bus trip, meals, and hotel room, all the way from Kansas City to Chicago, for a multi-day, non-paying protest? How did a whole bus full of such people afford it? Might the SEIU perhaps have funded the bus, perhaps paying the protesters to take the time off work? Not to say that they don’t have a right to do so, but the knowledge just might color our opinion of it. Why is a 35-year-old man still earning minimum wage at McDonald’s? Everybody knows if you show up on time and make an effort, nobody stays at minimum wage for long. Wouldn’t a rational person seek a better job, rather than trying to just squeeze a somewhat-less-awful salary out of an entry level position? Who gave him the idea that shaking down a private business is a “fight for freedom” in any way related to the civil rights efforts of the 1960s? Every starting employee gets the same pay at a McDonald’s; they don’t have a different minimum wage for blacks than they do for whites, for goodness’ sake! Somebody must have planted that idea in the malleable minds of the protesters, don’t you think?
But today’s big city newspapers don’t desire curious readers anymore; they don’t address such questions in their articles, and they hope the reader doesn’t think of them either.
The Story of Reverend William Barber
The helpful propagandists shared the tale of Rev. William Barber, who traveled from Goldsboro, NC to turn the protest into a racial event.
Now, no sane person can see a business story about McDonald’s and think about race. There is simply no natural racial element to this story. So the helpful propagandist must invent one; and so, by corollary, the curious reader will ask questions.
McDonald’s is popular with whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians. People of every race and ethnicity work there, dine there, go in for carry-out there, and use the drive-through there. So, how can a racial aspect be invented without laughing off the charge from the start? The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) supports the effort for a national $15/hour minimum wage, so they state that the NAACP’s mere involvement in the issue automatically gives it a racial aspect, deservedly or not. Why should we let them get away with it? The NAACP claims a racial aspect because “people of color are disproportionally working in low-wage jobs.” Why do they blame the wage of the jobs they have, rather than complaining about the lack of other, more desirable, higher-wage jobs? Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that society is failing our minorities if the only jobs they can get are burger-flipper positions at McDonald’s? Aren’t we complaining about exactly the wrong issue here?
But again, the article doesn’t ask these questions, as any college journalism instructor would have directed the writer to do, because it wouldn’t fit the narrative. Sadly, the “curious reader” is not the target audience of a modern newspaper.
The Story of Mary Kay Henry
The helpful propagandist interviewed Mary Kay Henry, president of the communist-affiliated Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and gave her a chance to say her piece.
They don’t really care which union the members vote to represent them, they say (wink wink, nudge nudge); the SEIU is organizing this protest to ensure that entry level burger-flippers have the opportunity to join a union. So it’s not just about the wage rate; it’s about unionizing the marketplace of fast food restaurants.
The curious reader has questions about this too… questions that the Tribune didn’t ask.
A case can be made for unionizing a huge factory with thousands of workers, in which the individual may be just a faceless ID number in the ledgers of upper management. But a fast food restaurant has a few employees working at a time, perhaps a dozen or so at the high end. At this scale, surely a manager can know his employees at a personal level, and not need some “shop steward” to serve as the middleman to carry him every grievance, to serve as the negotiator of every ten cent raise. So, isn’t this effort for urgently-needed unionization a rather outrageous stretch? Unions don’t do anything for free. How can minimum wage employees possibly be expected to afford union dues? Oh, right… maybe THAT’S what the minimum wage hike is really for: to fill into the pockets of the union. Whatever wage-hikes the union wins for the employees, the union (and the government) will happily confiscate, leaving the employees no farther ahead (outside of paying taxes on the now-higher salary). Aren’t jobs at fast food places – not counting the management and owners, of course – supposed to be temporary part-time jobs while you’re in high school or college? Why on earth should a person be unionized in a job that’s meant to be short-term, while you’re on the way to something better? Or perhaps… is union membership intended to help lock them into this low-level job, to hold them back? There IS, and has always been, a single genuine path for advancement in the fast food business: the ones who enjoy the job can rise to management, then even to franchisee status themselves. Many successful franchisers started out on the grill. Unions, however, are notorious for driving wedges between labor and management… might the SEIU’s purpose be, at least partially, to interfere with that traditional career path, and keep the fry cooks in their place, so to speak? What else could explain it?
But again, the Tribune doesn’t expect the curious reader to wonder such things.
The Hard Truth
The reporters did manage to share some useful information before the end of the article, however: they pointed out that McDonald’s has already committed to generous raises for their own employees, but because they are largely a franchise business, they don’t control the salaries of every employee at every restaurant.
The rabble-rousers are on record as attempting, in both public opinion and the courts, to change that, and enable the long arm of the law to reach past the corporate headquarters of such companies and set the wages of individual franchises in their networks. Such a statist position is outrageous in the context of the American economic model, an invasion of ownership rights, a disregard for sovereignty and standing that only a globalist Marxist could dream up (and yes, of course, that’s exactly who did dream it up).
What the left doesn’t want us to consider about this whole story – what they go to great pains to hide, in fact, as they cheer and drum and parade and shout – is that the McDonald’s model is one of the things that works in this society, one of the great success stories, and the Left is doing everything they can to destroy it.
Consider:
A) On a beautiful spring day in a metro area of six million people, with plenty of notice, the organizers couldn’t even draw two thousand protesters without busing them in from a thousand miles away. That doesn’t sound like a popular movement, does it?
B) McDonald’s is a millionaire-creation engine. For over five decades, people have started out as fry cooks and risen to ownership of their own franchises or management positions at corporate headquarters. The same model has been copied by dozens of other such institutions, all of which have helped the enterprising poor to break the divisions of class and race to enter the middle class and even the wealthy. This country is not interested in the Left’s efforts to destroy that path.
C) Despite their acknowledged imperfection from a pure nutrition perspective, the fast food industry enables people to occasionally dine out inexpensively – people who could not afford fancier traditional restaurants – while they raise their families and climb the rungs their own, in their own way, to eventually move beyond it. It’s a valuable step on the ladder in a demographically-fluid society.
D) This marketplace serves as a wonderful training engine for the American workforce. Millions of Americans get their first job at a fast food place, learning customer service, learning cooking, learning the cash register, learning to follow the orders of a manager. The job pays far more than its salary; it serves as the experience that gets a kid his next job and his next. It serves as the springboard that leads the kid to a career.
E) The entry level jobs of a McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s serve another special purpose: they have the most flexible hours imaginable. They are therefore perfect for the high school or college student who’s at class during the day, but needs to make money – and get work experience! – in the evenings, weekends and late nights when he or she is free. The job isn’t meant to be permanent. It’s not meant to support a family. It’s meant to help spur him or her on to the next job, and the next. Any course of action that restrains this wonderful forward motion is a very destructive obstacle, harming the very people the Left claims to care about!
F) The core problem isn't the wage levels paid by entry level jobs; the core problem in today's economy is that these are all the jobs that millions of us can compete for. Why are 90 million Americans outside the workforce? Why is our government driving manufacturing away with crippling taxes and regulations? The key isn't the jobs that these people do have, it's the lack of alternative jobs that should be able to switch to! Why doesn't the American Left stop destroying the more valuable jobs that these fast food employees ought to be able to graduate to?
This is the problem, at its heart: The modern American Left knows what works, and they oppose it.
They know that the fast food industry, and entry-level retail in general, serves a marvelous role in taking inexperienced kids and teaching them how to be employees, so that they can move up somewhere else. The Left may not admit it, but they detest class mobility. They detest the American Way of improving yourself, level by level, growing in talent and responsibility to build a successful career. And they want to stop this progression wherever they can.
This may be marketed as a simple, run-of-the-mill minimum wage hike campaign, but it’s so much more:
It’s a campaign to help the dying anachronistic trade union movement to come back from the dead. It’s a campaign to crush the American franchise system by regulating small businesses exactly like we regulate deep-pocketed big businesses. It’s a campaign to keep the poor where they are, dependent on government for their housing and food and education. It’s a campaign to stop upward mobility in the private sector. It’s a campaign to rob our nation, once and for all, from any claim to the wonderful benefits of a free market economy.
And if we want America to survive, we must deny them every one of their heartless, statist goals.
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Copyright 2015 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based trade compliance trainer and writer. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Twitter at @johnfdileo or on his own site at johnfdileo.com.
A good time to be a work automation salesperson.
That’s right;
then both of the people working in a MacDonald’s will be making $15 an hour, while the other 10 who used to work there will be making ZIP.
Every time some company is forced to pay $15 an hour they should up the requirements ...make a college degree necessary to work there...plus American citizenship...
there are enough out of work Americans with college degrees to cover the vacant spots when the newly unqualified are no longer working at McDonald’s..
Much more automation is coming. We will have burger in a box locations that have few if any employees on site and the food quality will be better IMO.
SEIU "Rent-A-Mob" pays a lot more than flipping burgers and it is far more fun!
[ Much more automation is coming. We will have burger in a box locations that have few if any employees on site and the food quality will be better IMO. ]
I wouldn’t mind making 50 bucks an hour driving all around town unjamming the automated mechanisms and performing software updates on the automated burger flipper devices, as I have the tech skills to do so.
:D
McDonald’s made it possible for the semi-illerate to work their registers, so it won’t be hard for them to develop automated cashiers. That will be much less expensive than employing humans.
I know college graduates with families who are working in white collar jobs for less than $15 an hour..
granted theyre here in TN but if they can live on less than $15 an hour why would someone with no education have any right to more ???
Why do you think that “education” entitles people to more?
Sounds like you have been brainwashed by the ed establishment.
well personally I prefer a doctor who was educated in heart surgery..
Those are NOT rank and file protesters. Who is paying them? Who bought the shirts? Who printed the signs?
When they can get an order right, maybe then they can get a raise.
American Communists are hard at work to destroy the business of this country and turn their ‘union members’ into slaves of the state. Creating a new communist nation after the US and other nations destroyed the Communist USSR to which they owed their true allegiance. And thus, bh0 is their Manchurian candidate.
True but an hospital CEO with a mere masters earns two to three times as much.
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