This is the same forum that regularly bashes welfare recipients and yet here’s a group of people working an honest job for a Corp that is worth who knows how much and it’s somehow offensive that the workers try to get more money.
I hate to say it but the attitude of some of the conservatives here toward struggling workers may be why we’re losing everywhere.
My posts on this thread and other restaurant threads are not "anti worker," but I believe merely pro-reality.
The fast food business model formed in the 1930s-1950s from two changes in society, the increasingly mobile public, and an increasing middle class. Previous to the 1940s, restaurants were for the upper class. Workers too their lunches to the factory in buckets, and later lunch pails. The McDonald's fanchise business model brought consistency and cheap warm food to the middle class, but it does so by controlling costs.
Today we have 2.7 million workers in the fast food industry, which runs on thin margins. And now the government thinks it can do better to run the industry. It has mandated health care, it is raising taxes on small business, which is what these are, it wants to raise taxes on "millionaires" making 250k, which is what they are, it has raised regulatory requirements for signs, and now the workers are being encouraged to form unions and strike for whatever is left.
The fast food business model can't support all of those new requirements. It hires low cost employees for a reason, because it operates on a thin margin. Raise the costs, and they have to raise the prices. If they raise the prices, people will substitute, because they can do so easily. It is already cheaper to bring a lunch in a lunch pail from home, it is just a convenience to go to Taco Bell. But if Taco Bell keeps raising their prices, more and more people will decide it is not worth the convenience and will substitute. The government can force costs to rise, but it can't force customers to go there.
The only thing fast food restaurants can do to survive is to fight these added costs as best they can. They will hire only part time workers. They will automate as much as possible, and get as lean as possible. Jobs will be lost, jobs that business owners were willing to pay for before all these regulations.
What no one on the "worker" side seems to understand is that the fast food business model is not a pre ordained, must have business model. Regulations can kill the entire industry. I believe these regulations are more "anti worker" than the business owners, or any of these posts.
They need to automate and just have one guy back there and some machines doing most of the work.
Then they can pay $15 an hour, to that guy