New York fast food workers strike over low wages [want $15/hr]

Inflation is hurting everyone.

What state are you in?

Fantasyland?

“You make 11k per year and have money left over?”

Sure do! I just got Christmas presents for the special people in my life!

Most people in the real world pay more in taxes than your wage of 11k per year.

You could not be considered the norm by any stretch of the imagination. You coming in here bloating how you easily live on 11k a year is a joke.

I give it a 4 on the honking hoot scale.

“A guy named Roy Kroc started McDonalds. When he opened his first store, he worked the cash register himself. He was a small entrepreneur, just like you were, with no reputation of any kind.”

We weren’t talking about Ray Kroc. Who didn’t actually start McDonalds. That was the Mcdonalds brothers in San Beradino.

Ray Krok became their franchiser and later bought them out. He already had a reputation in the food industry as the owner of a company that sold milk shake mixers. He was also a salesman for food service supplys. Napkins and cups and such.

It’s certainly not the same chain it was then. Now it’s fully established with Billions and Billions served.

You run your own business. I believe you mentioned being in the Dallas area. I have no idea what regulations your business are forced to operate under.
I do have some idea what building trade wages are going to cost you. Although I am a few years out of date.

Should you determine there are opportunities worth pursuing in NYC.and decide to open a business there.
Everything will cost more, except in this case labor.
Wages have largely stagnated for at least the last 15 years.
If prices have to be raised to pay the employees, well that’s the cost of being a business owner.

The business has a couple of choices. They can raise wages or they risk having the workers unionize.
And I’d still bet that even should the workers unionize, MickyDs stays open. When the price of fuel spikes, prices across the board go up. Consumers piss and moan and maybe a few even cut back, but mostly they piss and moan and keep to their routine.
Business doesn’t offer gasoline sellers 40 cents on the dollar for their fuel with the argument that they can take that or put me out of business and not sell any gas at all.

I wonder what kind of volume a busy MickyDs in NYC does in a shift.

“What state are you in? Fantasyland?”

The greatest state in the nation. :)

Boom Like That - Mark Knopfler

I’m going to San Bernardino ring-a-ding-ding
Milkshake mixers that’s my thing, now
These guys bought a heap of my stuff
And I gotta see a good thing sure enough, now
Or my name’s not Kroc that’s Kroc with a ‘K’
Like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, yeah
It’s dog eat dog rat eat rat
Kroc-style boom, like that

The folks line up all down the street
And I’m seeing this girl devour her meat, now
And then I get it, wham as clear as day
My pulse begins to hammer and I hear a voice say

These boys have got this down
Oughtta be a one of these in every town
These boys have got the touch
It’s clean as a whistle and it don’t cost much
Wham, bam you don’t wait long
Shake, fries patty, you’re gone
And how about that friendly name?
Heck, every little thing oughtta stay the same
Or my name’s not Kroc that’s Kroc with a ‘K’
Like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
It’s dog eat dog rat eat rat
Kroc-style boom, like that

You gentlemen ought to expand
You’re going to need a helping hand, now
So, gentlemen well, what about me?
We’ll make a little business history, now
Or my name’s not Kroc call me Ray
Like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
It’s dog eat dog rat eat rat
Kroc-style boom, like that

Well we build it up and I buy ‘em out
But, man they made me grind it out, now
They open up a new place flipping meat
So I do, too right across the street

I got the name I need the town
They sell up in the end and it all shuts down
Sometimes you gotta be an s.o.b.
You want to make a dream reality
Competition? send ‘em south
If they’re gonna drown
Put a hose in their mouth
Do not pass ‘go’ go straight to hell
I smell that meat hook smell

Or my name’s not kroc that’s Kroc with a ‘K’
Like ‘crocodile’ but not spelled that way, now
It’s dog eat dog rat eat rat
Kroc-style boom, like that

You’re from California. You folks know nothing about flyover country. You have the haughty, “this is reality” down just pat.

As Mr. Reagan once said - “you know so much that isn’t so”.

Yes, I live on about that every year. And yes, I live quite confortably on it. :)

Where else would be the greatest state of the nation.

I’ve read a bit about Ray Kroc.
This pretty much follows all the things I’ve read.

Thanks Winflier, you’re so right. I had a lapse there didn’t I. Chalk up one more person who has a massive loss, if this union thing catches on.

Thanks GeronL.

“Yes, I live on about that every year. And yes, I live quite confortably on it. :)”

Not trying to be contrary here, but what would happen if say 100,000 people left NYC or Caili and moved to your town because it’s cheaper to live.

That’s my exact point. Thank you. TX is not CA or NYC. If the people of NYC want to pay their McDonalds workers 20/hr, fine by them.

The problem is when they try to jack up the minimum wage laws to screw everyone else over.

If they came here? They’d either:

1, get bored and leave, or:
2, get a gun, go to church and love it here. :)

I left a socialist hellhole myself to come down to Texas, and I couldn’t be happier.

If prices have to be raised to pay the employees, well that’s the cost of being a business owner. The business has a couple of choices. They can raise wages or they risk having the workers unionize.

In what kind of bizarro world is that true? Soviet Russia?

Bob, I've tried my best to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but the more you talk, the more I'm convinced that you honestly don't grasp the fundamental economics at work here. That's curiously out of step for someone who claims to have run a business for five years.

Perhaps you started your business with a built-in customer base, and never had to duke it out with the local competition. I've seen guys whose businesses were built on that model. When they lost one or more of their stable clients, they couldn't cope with the real forces at work in the marketplace. I think of such entrepreneurs as babies crawling through a war zone, somehow avoiding the mayhem all around them.

I don't know if that was you or not, but you don't talk like someone who's successfully dealt with the real world forces that control the free market. You sound a lot more like an armchair theorist with a liberal bent.

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.

You also assume (like liberals do) that businesses can simply raise their prices to accommodate higher wage demands from their employees, and that employees can force a business to do that by organizing a union.

Those are communistic viewpoints, and very strange for a conservative.

This has been interesting, but I think I'm done now. You've got some fixed viewpoints that aren't shifting in this conversation. That says to me that your utopian ideas of how a free market operates, are more real to you than the real world facts I'm presenting.

Later.

“That’s my exact point. Thank you. TX is not CA or NYC. If the people of NYC want to pay their McDonalds workers 20/hr, fine by them.”

I agree that this is more of a regional issue.
The issue IMO of a federal minimum wage is that it’s a big city solution that doesn’t work in rural areas.

Like your personal example of living well on less.
I know small town folks who have combined incomes of 50-60K a year and they live well.
A mandated minimum wage of say $12 an hour would seriously damage a lot of small town economies.
By that same notion though, you can’t expect a small town solution to remedy stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs of living in a place like NYC.
The argument that says they should just move is a bit simple minded. It’s like saying if you don’t have enough...well make more money.

“you can’t expect a small town solution to remedy stagnant wages and skyrocketing costs of living in a place like NYC.”

Let me ask you a question.

If someone came up to you and said that gravitational acceleration was over 10 m/s in their location, what would you say to them and why? You’d say that was bogus because, “gravity works the same everywhere”.

See, this is the thing about economics. Economics works, everywhere. The reason why NYC is doing so poorly is because they indulge in bad economics. Everyone can live like I do - the problem in NYC is that the law is set up to deliberately defy economics.

If NYC were to bring their minimum wage down to where it was nationally, NYC would actually see their COL go down.

“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.

Why are you sympathizing with these enemies of our Republic?

Because I think wage busting is as big an enemy as unions.

McDonalds was founded on the premise high school age kids would be employed there. It was not founded on the idea a man or woman would come to work there and support a family on that level salary.

This was never about wage busting. It was about a business model that adults decided to crash, and now complain about. There is a considerable difference.

McDonalds didn't just come under new management. Their policies didn't just change overnight. They are doing what they have always done. There was a reason why they established this model decades ago. I think the model still applies. I don't think they're pulling the wool over anyone's eyes here.

I don't see them as an enemy of the people, are any descriptive labeling that comes close to that.

There wouldn’t be unions had they not become necassary. To a large degree they’ve outlived their usefullness.

I pretty much agree with the first sentence here. As for the second, here's how I would have stated it. ~~To a large degree~~ they’ve outlived their usefullness. Worse yet, they've become a massive destructive force globally.

Any CEO will tell you straight out that their only goal is to make money, if that means outsourcing then they outsource, if it means paying substandard wages and they can get away with it then they do that as well.

Okay, and here's the example that contrasts with the McDonald's model. The jobs that were outsourced, were jobs that adults did traditionally take. They WERE supposed to support families. And that's why I call one evil, and don't the other. We became a nation second to none with jobs that supported families. What has happened since? We sold ourselves out here. It's painfully obvious.

Families weren't going bust before we started outsourcing. Manufacturing workers were able to purchase the goods made in the United States. They were also able to afford a home, clothe and feed their families. They were able to purchase the family vehicle. Their salaries contributed to the community they were spent in. Those familes were not a drain on society. Can we say the same thing about service workers today? Perhaps so if people really struggle. In many instances the answer is no.

With McDonalds we didn't see a trade out of manufacturing level wages with minimum wages. With manufacturing we did see that type of a swap out. Manufacturing jobs paid a decent salary, and service jobs generally don't. We in effect sold out the guy down the block, so a guy in China could work in his place. There's no comparison to this model, when you look at what has been the model at McDonalds since the first unit's doors opened.

I heard the outsource argument that said companies moved overseas because unions broke them, but if it were just about pay and bennies why not just move to a right to work state.

There were instances of this. I believe the steel industry and the vehicle manufacturing industries are good examples. For the lions share of manufacturing moved off-shore, that wasn't the case. Moving to a 'right to work state' wasn't really going to accomplish anything in most instances. They already had a non-union shop.

The middle class is largely gone and that’s not going to come back if the policy is that large Corps can pay whatever they feel like paying the workers.

In some instances I have more sympathy towards your agument here, than I do in others. The McDonalds model doesn't support your emphasis here. It's model was never intended to support families. The Walmart model would be a much better claim IMO. That being said, it's a very tough call for me to accept that 'Here it is, please pay on the way out' is as worthy of manufacturing wages as 'incorporating proper engineering and manufacturing requirements into your work process' would be. In one you're a part of the creative process. In the other, you're simply a gopher.

It may seem radical to you but I believe that somebody working a fulltime job is justified in having a reasonable expectation that they can feed, clothe, and house themselves. Not in grand style, but where they don’t still need assistance.

In some instances I am more sympathetic to your claim here. In others, there's no possibility I'm going to agree with you. And I have to say, that I see a return of manufacturing to the United States, to be much more prefferable than simply artificially paying people with no hand in the creative process, the same wages as someone who did, or more acurately, would have.

Increasing the wages of people outside the creative process, becomes the worst of all worlds. We move the jobs off-short to decrease costs. We lose the manufacturing jobs, we hand over the proprietary patent information, in short order we lose R&D, and then we pay people the same salary for doing nothing that is creative. And then you have the union which has jumped in with both socialist feet, dictating to employers and the employees, helping to elect the worst socialist (read that enemy of our nation, and in Obama's case way beyond just socialist) they can find.

And if you look at this clearly focused, you'll note that the union who professes to want to help the family unit on the front end, is using almost all it's energy to devise and implement policies that will destroy every right of parents and thus the family units.

BTW I thought a lot of posts on this thread were more than anti union, they were anti working people.

And ultimately, you may see my comments that way too. If you do, I can't help that. As citizens you and I are supposed to advocate for sound policy. That's what I'm trying to do.

Go forward with that message and see how many people it converts to any conservative cause.

It IS NOT the duty of the Conservative cause to become socialist to win converts.

It IS the duty of the Conservative cause to find ways to explain sound policy, so that it will make so much sense to people that they will be unable to support anything else by the conviction of their own concience.

We simply cannot read the failure of us to do our job, as proof positive that we must abandon reason, and adopt the tenets of anarchy.

It's sad, but we have become like the new employee who states, "That's too hard. I can't possibly do it that way. You need to change that." Then once he's trained properly, "He says, now I understand. This isn't hard at all, and I understand why you asked me to do it that way in the first place."

It's time we went back to the drawing board. We're failing our task. We need to be trained properly, and we need to put in a lot of overtime.

“This was never about wage busting. It was about a business model that adults decided to crash, and now complain about. There is a considerable difference.”

I would say that whatever the earlier business model, that’s not the case now.
If it were meant as a kids job, they should have maintained the practice of hiring kids.
I’m actually part of the problem as I don’t eat fast food, but my kids do sometimes. The McDs nearest our house only has adult workers and their English is not very good.
I don’t know if they’re illegals ot guest workers.

I agree with the other points you made.