“You hold the same sort of assumptions that most liberals hold, namely that any job ought to pay a ‘living wage’, and that businesses are obligated to do whatever it takes to pay people at some arbitrarily determined level, just because the mob says they should.”
Then I’m obviously not being clear.
I didn’t say anything about anybody being owed a living wage.
What I said is if the business can’t pay wages that workers are willing to work for and the workers have an option to unionize then they will.
We were discussing a particular group of workers in a particular industry in a particular location.
Your business expertise (unless your business is fastfood burgers)doesn’t really carry over in this situation.
No I don’t think businesses can charge whatever they feel like charging. If McDs value meals went to $15 they’d certainly stop selling as many, but they can raise the price by $1 or so per meal...Have you ever bought a value meal at the airport? They run about $1.50 more. I’m guessing that’s because retail space cost more at the airport.
You said I seem to have a liberal slant. I think the same thing about your argument. That one size fits all.
A solution to a building trade problem in Dallas has little bearing on a fastfood issue in NYC except in the most theoretical sense.
I’d also note that with stagnant wages and rising costs of living, more people are going to turn to government assistance just to make ends almost meet. And that’s even if they are working a job.
You can say that it shouldn’t be that way, but that’s the reality of it.
I'm not going to wade back through the whole thread to find it now, but you definitely inferred that, even if you didn't directly state it as such. It's been one of your chief points throughout this conversation.
What I said is if the business can’t pay wages that workers are willing to work for and the workers have an option to unionize then they will.
Do you hear yourself? If a business can't afford to pay more for certain types of labor, then what good will it do for their workers to unionize (provided they can)?
If the fast food workers are unwilling to work for wages that the free market will support, then they need to upgrade their skills and seek work that does pay more. It's as simple as that.
No one's saying that these workers won't try to force McDonalds to pay them more, but they're going to run smack dab into the brick wall of reality, when they find that the net result of applying that force, is that fewer jobs are available in that company. They might even force the owners to close those stores and relocate to a saner market environment.
I've seen it happen before.
I lost one of the best jobs I ever had, because the Teamsters Union forced my company to relocate. They were already operating at barely sustainable margins, and the final push by the union was the last straw. Several hundred people lost their jobs at that one location, because of the greed of that union.
And we weren't the only ones. The Teamsters broke the backs of several other big freight haulers at the same time. Thousands lost their lifetime employment security in that one incident.
The McDonalds workers who are clamoring for more pay, need to realize that they do some of the most mindless, menial work in the economy, and that there simply isn't enough headroom in the pricing structure of their company's products to pay them more.
If these uneducated shlubs want to push it, and unionize all the fast food workers across the country, then there will be a lot less fast food restaurants, and a lot fewer of those kinds of jobs for entry level workers. In the end, who wins? Who loses?
Think about it.