Posted on 05/29/2013 10:03:46 AM PDT by MichCapCon
About 80 fast food workers picketed restaurant chains earlier this month saying they wanted to double their pay going from minimum wage $7.40 an hour to $15 an hour.
But business and economic experts say some of those workers would be out of a job if their demands were ever met.
"If forced by government to increase wages to $15 per hour across the board, affected restaurants would almost certainly have to lay off employees and reduce overall hours to compensate for increased overhead," said Justin Winslow, vice president of government affairs for the Michigan Restaurant Association.
Antony Davies, associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, said stockholders would get less return on their investments, consumers would pay more for fast food and the workers who could least afford to lose their jobs would likely be laid off.
Fast food companies would respond by cutting back on services, Davies said. Fast food restaurants already have cut costs and increased efficiency by eliminating some jobs workers used to perform. For example, at McDonald's customers fill their beverages, not the employees.
"Now here's where the very sad part comes," Davies said. "If you're a manager with six employees and you need to let two of them go in order to afford to pay the higher wage to the remaining four, who are you going to let go? Well, the remaining four will need to do the work that used to be done by six, so you're going to need to keep the most capable, responsible, and intelligent workers. Conclusion: The wage hike will end up simply taking money out of the pockets of the least advantaged workers and putting it in the pockets of the most advantaged workers."
Charles Owens, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said fast food jobs were never meant to support families.
"These are not career positions," he said. "They were never meant to be career positions. There is a segment of the population that wants to make a career out of those positions. Those positions don't support that kind of labor costs."
According to the National Restaurant Association 2013 survey, the average household income of restaurant workers who earn the federal minimum wage was $62,507. That meant in most cases, the fast food employees were not the head of the household.
"It is also important to understand that a majority of minimum wage workers are just beginning their professional lives, given that 46 percent are teenagers and 70 percent are under age 25," Winslow, of the Michigan Restaurant Association, said.
Don Byrne, an economics professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, said it all boils down to simple supply and demand. Byrne said that the number of employees will decrease if the cost of labor increases.
"The rationality of a demand is not correlated to the decibel level generated by the shouts of demonstrators," Byrne said.
Jenice Robinson and Renee Asher, national spokeswomen for the Service Employees International Union, which organized the protest, didn't respond to requests for comment.
The era of the $5.99 Big Mac is upon us..
This has nothing to do with "least advantaged" vs. "most advantaged" workers. It has to do with "hardest working" vs. "laziest".
We’ll be lucky if a Big Mac costs so little . . .
The McD’s “Big Tasty” is $4.25 according to http://www.mcdonalds.com.pk/products/view/menu-pricelist while my local sit-down restaurant has a larger, fresher burger for $8.00 with fries. How many people will go fast food rather than to a real restaurant if McD’s doubles their price and the real restaurant keeps the same price? The author is right that these people will lose their jobs.
The boss should tell them I will double your pay if you double your work.
Just another incentive to automate the process:
http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/robot-serves-up-340-hamburgers-per-hour/
Something is very wrong with that article. In the first place, IF a min. wage mcdonalds type worker is even able to get 40 hours a week, his wage is $15,080 per year, NOT $62,000! Most are lucky to get 10-20 hours a week. These types of workers don’t get tips.
I think what they did with to come up with the numbers is to average all types of restaurant work including those where tips are part of the wage, and then took the ceo salaries and averaged those out with the min wage workers who don’t get tips, to come up with the 62,000 figure.
But the article doesn’t talk about tipped employees, it talks about min wage mcdonalds types to give a false impression of greed.
Advantaged people DO make more money all across the board so to say that it’s not ‘fair’ to the disadvantaged makes this article a socialist hype. Make a point of watching further articles by this author because he/she’s not a critical thinker. Don’t reward writers like this. They are not good writers, and really, should be out of a job.
Directive 10-289?
This wage is what a PC Tech with a little experience gets paid.
I went to pick up a pizza about a month ago. I called in a pick up order. A young lady took my order. I went to pick it up. I think that she was the only employee there. This was a pizza place with a casino. One employee. She was good, and my pizza was tasty and on time, but one employee? Wow.
Here's the correct and simplest solution, fire them!
These are not $15/hour jobs. And the jobs do not belong to the employees. The jobs belong to the employers.
Should these "workers" want higher paying jobs, they can take their vast knowledge, skills, and abilities to anyplace willing to pay them their desired wages.
1. No one can be fired from his job.
2. Each business must sell exactly the same amount as it sold last year but cannot raise prices.
3. No one can sell, buy or close a business for the forseeable future.
You forgot:
4. No business owner will be allowed to commit suicide.
Why stop at $15/hour?
Don’t these fast food workers want nice cars too?
Go for it. $100/hour.
Or live like a lawyer. $400/hour.
What’s that? They wouldn’t hire anyone for that amount?
What makes them think they’d hire anyone for $15/hour?
A huge number of people don’t have the slightest idea what it means to have a business and to try to realize a profit in spite of labor’s demands, government’s obstacles, and racial quotas.
It is a dogma of communism that industry exploits its workers. The only solution is for government to take over all the means of production.
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