Wilmington Fast-Food Workers To Join Nationwide Strike Today
This is great news. A livable minimum wage for fast food workers will put a lot more money in the local economy by preventing multi-nationals like Yum Brands from moving profits to off shore tax havens. I hope other Delaware fast food workers see this and decide, in time, to participate in this worthy effort.
Wilmington Fast-Food Workers To Join Nationwide Strike Thursday
Movement for $15 and a Union Without Retaliation or Unfair Labor Practices Reaches WilmingtonWilmington , DE– Fast-food workers in Wilmington are expected to walk off their jobs Thursday as part of the largest-ever strike to hit the $200 billion industry. Inspired by strikes earlier this summer in seven cities across the country, Wilmington workers will walk off their jobs for the first time, calling for $15 an hour and the right to form a union without retaliation or unfair labor practices.
Thursday’s strike will span 50 cities and every region of the continental United States.
The Delaware chapter of Americans for Democratic Action, a progressive advocacy group, is supporting striking workers as a local partner. Local clergy, elected officials, and community supporters will join fast-food workers on the strike lines and at rallies as the nationwide fight for higher wages hits Wilmington.
In Wilmington, there are 7,336 fast-food workers. The median wage is $8.59. An adult with one child needs to make $21.84 an hour working full time in the Wilmington area just to afford the basics, according to a model developed by a professor at MIT.
In addition to Wilmington, strikes will hit cities all over the country, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Hartford, Houston, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York, Oakland Raleigh and Tampa.
The strikes follow walkouts by fast-food workers in seven cities earlier this summer and are the latest in an escalating series of walkouts by workers across the country. Federally-contracted workers in Washington have walked off their jobs; a growing number of Walmart workers have gone on strike; warehouse workers walked out; carwash workers have hit the picket lines; and, earlier this week, America’s port drivers parked their trucks.
I’m all for increasing the minimum wage, but, $15/hr for fast food workers? That’s more than some college graduates make!
A higher minimum would put upward pressure on all wages. The only people who have had their income go up over the past 20 years have been US Senators and their 1%er buddies.
I heard a really interesting factoid yesterday — the original March on Washington was for both Freedom and Jobs. One of the demands was a livable wage of $2.00/hour. If the marchers has gotten that demand, and that wage kept adjusting for inflation, the current livable wage would be $15.18.
@AQC – I take your point, but it’s really irrelevant. The salient point is in the post.
“An adult with one child needs to make $21.84 an hour working full time in the Wilmington area just to afford the basics, according to a model developed by a professor at MIT.”
These workers are just another example of powerless people being fucking streamrolled by the powerful. I dig what they’re doing….
What we need is a strike against all these bad food places if they don’t meet the demands.At $15.00 an hour the price of a big mac would have to go up.50cents to keep mickey dees profit the same.
How much does a $1.00 chicken sandwich really cost? Everything has a true, fully loaded, cost. When you buy a $1.00 chicken sandwich you pay for it partly with cash and partly with an unspoken agreement to take part in a dehumanizing economic system.
When you buy a $1.00 chicken sandwich you pay for it partly with cash and partly with an unspoken agreement to take part in a dehumanizing economic system.
And to support a food system that isn’t really about delivering you nutrition.
Mr 330 wrote:
It would, but would it be a good thing?
If you raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00 per hour, the minimum wage workers would receive a $7.75 per hour raise. The question is: would the current $10.00 per hour workers receive a $7.75 raise, to $17.75 per hour, or the $5.00 increase to take them to the legally required $15.00? Would workers already earning $18.00 an hour go to $25.75, or would their wages stay flat?
The answer, of course, is that it would vary by company, but overall, the most probable result would be a crowding of wages closer to the new minimum, making workers now earning well above the minimum closer to minimum wage workers.
Even if we assumed that everybody would get that $7.75 per hour raise, it would create the same crowding, percentagewise. The $7.25 minimum wage worker who gets a $7.75 per hour raise will have received 106.9% raise; the guy making $15.00 now, who gets a $7.75 raise, would get a 51.7% increase.
Naturally, all of those mandated raises mean that prices will have to be increased, because businesses still have to make a profit. The new $15.00 minimum will wind up buying just about what the current $7.25 minimum does now, because that’s just the way economics works.
Inflation is actually good for some people, but it’s bad for others. Those of us who are paying mortgages or otherwise owe money would be better off: as inflation raises our pay, but our dollar-denominated debts remain static, our debt payments become a smaller portion of our paychecks. Government will be better off, because its dollar-denominated debts would be lower in real terms.
But if you are retired, living on Social Security and your savings, while SS might be increased to match inflation, your dollar-denominated savings would drop in real value, and you would be significantly poorer. Since local governments would have to increase property tax assessments, to take in the money they need to function under inflated prices, people’s property taxes would have to go up, and again, if you are retired or otherwise living on your investments, you get hit hard.
The fact is McDonalds increased last quarter’s dividend by 10% ($.70/share to $.77/share). When do we get into a situation where we stop feeding the war chests of stockholders and investors on the back of the poor. I wonder how many of those who made thousands of dollars on their McDonald investments complain about SNAP? Maybe less people would need WIC assistance if a living wage was paid.
I understand that there are pensioners living on investment income, but keeping these workers in poverty can’t be the answer to that, can it?
Mr 330 wrote:
Why would it do that? Since the prices which the fast food places would have to charge would increase, the multinationals would still see roughly the same profits, adjusted for inflation.
The businesses which would see the real profit squeeze wouldn’t be the multinationals, but the franchise-holders, the small businesses which run one or three or four fast-food restaurants.
If every full-time job paid a minimum $30,000 a year, there would be far fewer of the working poor on benefits like SNAP. A higher minimum wage shifts some of the costs of keeping these people afloat from the government to the “job creators.”
Exactly. We seem to have adopted a plutocratic system which assumes that any actual labor that society depends on is nearly worthless, and any money management, wealth building scheme dreamed up by the top 2% is inherently virtuous.
Mr Geezer wrote:
The big, big problem that you don’t want to know about is this: not every job produces enough to justify $30,000 a year in current dollars. And, quite frankly, not every employee is worth $15.00 an hour, even if the job could produce that much.
If the “job creators” have to bear more of the burden for keeping people afloat, they will create fewer jobs; that’s just economic reality. The job creator cares first and foremost about his company’s profit; that is what he is supposed to care about.
Y’all got your way with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and what is it yielding? Companies cutting back part timers’ hours, to keep them under the 30 hour threshold for providing health insurance, and other small businesses working to stay under 50 employees, for the same reasons. You are seeing companies take all sorts of cost-cutting measures to get around the PP&ACA requirements, because that is what sensible businessmen do.
If nothing else, it is just showing us what greedy slime-balls most “job creators” are. Actively trying to keep their employees at a low standard of living. Voluntarily keeping their beloved business small so they don’t have to lift a finger for another human. It’s disgusting…. and totally unnecessary.
Costco is doin’ just fine. They have put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by treating their human resources like humans. Dana, you are defending greed. If a company cant stay in business while playing fair, they don’t deserve to be in business.
YUM! Brands’ CEO David Novak (Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut)
made $44.3 million last year. Average Yum Brands employee…?
$7.25
First of all, I did not get MY way with Obamacare. The most efficient, cheapest way to do this is Medicare for all, which we’ll eventually get to. Obamacare is an abomination, but to blame employers’ bad decisions on it is the ultimate bullshit story. You probably believe them when they say they can’t make food safer, too.
“If the “job creators” have to bear more of the burden for keeping people afloat, they will create fewer jobs; that’s just economic reality.”
No, it is not economic reality. Economic reality is that employers will hire people when they have no other way of satisfying demand.
In your economic ignorance, you seem to believe that employers can only make do with profits at their current levels. That is not economic reality, either. Since Reagan, worker productivity no longer tracks corporate profits, as it had for decades before that.
The employers that are reacting the worst to this are the employers that we not only could do without, but would do better without: Franchised eating establishments, which pay their workers well below the levels their productivity would suggest and funnel the profits to the top instead.
We have already seen what Austrian/Chicago School economics gets us — a small but very rich upper-upper class, an enormous gap between rich and poor (the highest since we started tracking it) and enormous expenses for the safety net.
There is no longer any excuse to keep doing it your way.
Socialistic Ben wrote:
I think you will find that whether a company “deserves” to be in business is not the standard which keeps companies in business. Only one thing does that: making enough money to cover expenses and leave the business owners with enough additional money on which to live.
And, of course, most businesses don’t succeed; most wind up failing.
One thing that my friends on the left simply do not understand, or do not want to understand, or understand but refuse to admit, is that not every person can succeed, not every person can or will produce enough to be paid much or even keep a job.
If I hire Joe Schmuckatella, and he’s lazy, he slacks off, he doesn’t produce, and he calls out once a week, would you expect me to keep hm on the payroll? No, not even my liberal friends would expect that. If I hire Jason330, and it turns out that he’s just not very good, and he actually produces about $7.25 an hour worth of goods — and even a $7.25 an hour employee costs companies more than $7.25 an hour — would you really expect me to pay him $15.00 an hour, or would you expect me to get rid of him? I’d guess that every one of you has been around long enough to have known people like that, people who were just not good employees.
Realistic economics: if a minimum wage employer has to start paying $15.00 an hour for what they were paying $7.25 an hour previously, they are going to have to get twice the production out of each employee as previously, and cut his workforce in half if he can’t also double sales.
You are seeing companies take all sorts of cost-cutting measures to get around the PP&ACA requirements, because that is what sensible businessmen do.
The only businessmen doing this are those looking to extracting their profits on the backs of poor people. Businessmen whose businesses are based on delivering quality goods at a fair price and who see their employees as the way they get there are not. c.f Costco, Publix. Neither of these companies are routinely sending their employees to SNAP or Medicaid to make ends meet. The Australian minimum wage is $15+ and their economy is fine. Fine in terms of all of the countries that are surviving the crash.
“The job creator cares first and foremost about his company’s profit; that is what he is supposed to care about.”
The “efficient market” theory, like all of modern wingnut economics, is complete garbage that has been thoroughly debunked.
is that not every person can succeed, not every person can or will produce enough to be paid much or even keep a job.
No one is even arguing this.
But businesses are already getting way more productivity than they are paying for
Which probably means that low wage workers should just slow down and provide only the productivity they are compensated for.
Mr 330 wrote:
$7.25 is the legal federal minimum wage. For your statement to be correct, every YUM! employee must be making minimum wage. I’m guessing that your statement is incorrect.
Now, for whom does Mr Novak work? He works for the people who own the 446 million shares of YUM stock. His job is to produce the maximum return on their investments. You might not think that’s a very nice way to do business, but that’s economic reality.
You are mistaking your faith-based version of wingnut economics for reality.
And BTW – Prior to the 1970’s and the rise of the “efficient market” theory, and Milton Friedman’s now thoroughly debunked moneterism, CEO’s worked for the Board, company employees, the community and their country.
This idea that there is no social contract is a recent invention.
Dana has it exactly right. On the back of thousands of working poor people investors make money. I think I said that in my comment about McDonalds’ dividend increase last quarter. So, this strike is about pealing a tiny sliver of that back for the employees making wages but still living in poverty. See, Dana, some people hold views about changing things for people. Getting them off food stamps maybe… stabilizing marginal communities with a living wage… you know… radical shit.
When I was getting my MBA I heard some version of “the highest and best business objective is profit maximization” from a lot of the faculty who came of age in the 1970’s.
The argument (that was being presented as established fact) was that if a firm pursues profits first last and always, “more stakeholders win.” In other words, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders (owners) affiliated with the firm “win.”
The problem with the theory is that it is bullshit. In the pursuit of profits above all else, and absent a social contract – jobs shifted overseas, suppliers got squeezed, communities were pitted one against another in a breakneck race to the bottom and the only winners were the owners.
This is reality. People like Dana are in the thrall of a failed religion.
Very interesting Jason. The only way the argument in favor of maximization of profit can exist, is when it is practiced in a supported system, where the needs of society are met elsewhere. Sort of like the 1970’s….
Mr Gray wrote:
I’d suggest, then, that my good friends at the Delaware Liberal get together, incorporate, get a good franchise — go for a Wendy’s, ’cause I like Wendy’s chili — and run it the way that you (plural) have suggested. Pay your workers $15.00 an hour, and be sure to provide good health insurance. Please, let me know how successful that is.
For most fast-food franchise owners, reality is working 70+ hours a week (often both husband and wife working long hours) to make the franchise profitable, and still not being much better off than they’d have been working in a cubicle at MBNA. They have to keep paying their franchising fees to the national company, and, in a lot of cases, the prices they can charge are set by the national company and its advertising.
Now, it’s all well and good that you “hold views about changing things for people,” but you have to ask if those views are consistent with economics, if they come together with reality.
Think about most of the franchise owners. Most of them are small businessmen, and most of them were hourly workers for other people before going into business for themselves. These people aren’t the wicked ol’ corporatists trying to grind down the poor, but people who have been working class themselves. One would think that if the vision you have is economically realistic, a lot of those franchise owners would have already gone for it. I’m wondering just why that hasn’t happened.
Australia has something like a $15 minimum wage, and they’re doing just fine…. better than fine, actually.
Visited there with wife a daughter, and found that food costs there weren’t so bad.
I think $15/hour would work here too…
@Kavips That’s right. By the 1980’s monetarism was already showing signs of being snake oil, so the faithful came up with a new wrinkle.
They said that it was really okay if only owners “won” initially because the enormous benefits of capitalism unshackled by a social contract would “trickle down” to the underclasses. The only surprising thing about all of this is that so many people bought it. Milton Friedman, in fact, won a Nobel Prize.
Well, look at this, Dana…
And how’s Costco doing? Well, they’re kicking Walmarts a$$.
If Costco is kicking WalMart’s butt, why hasn’t WalMart moved to the CostCo model?
WalMart is the largest corporation in America, and can buy plenty of top economists and business managers, yet for some reason, they have chosen to follow a business model you are telling us isn’t working nearly as well as one of their competitors.
WalMart’s top leadership isn’t stupid; if something works just so much better, then they’ll adopt it. In business, you do what works, and businessman are notorious copycats.
Poor chap. Have you been to a WalMart lately?
Costco: 8 percent rate of growth in year-on-year sales
Walmart: an anemic 1.2 percent rise in sales, and that is only because they’ve added stores.
Also – is your ass hurting too much from being spanked so hard in this thread?
You know it is.
Viewing Walmart as a case study, I’d predict that they either fail and go bankrupt in the next 10 years, or change to a Costco type model and begin to pretend that they value the social contract.
There is plenty of time, and they have the money to turn the ship before it runs aground. The Walton family is one of the wealthiest in the world. Having made their fortunes, they don’t really need the stores to operate on the kinds of net profit margins they have in the past. The only “losers” will be stock speculators who came to the game 25 years too late.
Some of these people better hope they don’t start paying $15 per hour wages, because they will find themselves replaced by more qualified people looking for that $15.
For most fast-food franchise owners, reality is working 70+ hours a week (often both husband and wife working long hours) to make the franchise profitable, and still not being much better off than they’d have been working in a cubicle at MBNA.
I don’t believe it . If you have the money to open one of these franchises you hire a manager and make him/her work the long hours.
The difference between between business owners on the right and the left is that conservatives are driven by greed whereas liberals are driven by enlightened self interest.
While the Costco model is obviously preferable to workers over the Wal-Mart model, research I did after my older daughter worked briefly for Costco points out that utopias that seem too good to be true usually are.
For example, those great benefits and pay don’t kick in at Costco until you have been there for 90 days, and most Costco franchises intentionally keep at least 25% of their low-end workforce on salary for about 85 days and then boot them before they qualify.
Costco also has a pretty poor record for pushing employees to work faster in marginally safe conditions, leading to a relatively high rate of worker injuries.
I’m not suggesting that a comparison between Wal-Mart and Costco doesn’t come out in Costco’s favor, but let’s not idealize Costco.
Benefits that don’t kick in until xx days after you are employed is pretty typical in the private sector. I think I had to wait for 120 days with my current employer.
And I’d love to see the OSHA recordables for Costco v Walmart. Can you provide a link to those?
No one is idealizing Costco — in a comparison to other employers in that industry, they aren’t working from a business model that requires taxpayers to step into the breach.
cassandra
I did this research about two years ago. I’ll try to find you the link.
Benefits kicking in after xx days IS a normal practice. Keeping a steady 25% of your work force in this category more or less permanently is not.
If Obama was not wrecking the economy minimum wage would be a non issue and perhaps we can put Obama, Biden, Congress and all the lobbyists on minimum wage?
Dana: Really? You want us to start a franchise? No greater ripoff exists in the business world than the franchise model, as the wreckage of hundreds of would-be chains should illustrate.
You don’t seem to understand that a WalMart business model succeeds only to the extent that the rules we adopt benefit its model. Many countries don’t allow their practices, and so it must — and does — adapt to differing rules in different countries. Yet the company not only survives but thrives there.
I realize that the most fervent fever dream of the right is that the fewer the rules, the better the society, yet that absurd notion is championed not because of but despite thousands of years of human history.
@Liberals Are Idiots (aka Mike Protack): Are you now incapable of even pretending to know something about the issues? What a feeble nothing of a man you are.
Oops. No outing.
Keeping a steady 25% of your work force in this category more or less permanently is not.
Would like to see this data too. Because maintaining a 25% workforce churn is not cheap and is hugely inefficient.
I have to keep reminding myself – If you don’t link, your stat is made up.
I’m really interested in those recordables or at least yearly EMRs. In my RL, my company’s survival depends upon a pretty big investment in safety and in keeping an EMR below 1.0. Seriously, no one will even hire us with an EMR greater than 1. Want to see how these big box stores stack up. High RIRs or even EMRs up your insurance premiums too — so it isn’t cheap to maintain high risk workplaces. I’m interested to know how they can do it, really.
Cassandra wrote:
That’s pretty much the fast-food restaurant model: hiring a lot of teenagers, staffing to expect a couple to call off sick every day, and high turnover. Some individual franchise owners have tried to get away from that, and retirees looking to make some extra cash to supplement their Social Security are proving to be a better, more stable workforce for some fast food restaurants.
Actually that’s not true. Go to any fast food place of your choice during the school year and see how many teenagers are serving up coffee at 10AM. Teenagers are fast being displaced from a bunch of these jobs, because the long term unemployed OR the elderly whose pensions aren’t adequate are taking them. There weren’t many young people in the pictures of the strikers yesterday.
Fast food places may have a high worker turnover — Steve is claiming that Costco actually plans to turnover 25% of their new employees in order to not pay benefits.
Mr Geezer wrote:
Well, there sure seem to be a lot of other people who believe that buying a franchise from Wendy’s or McDonald’s is the way that they can succeed in business. And since this thread concerned fast food workers, and the statements of the liberal cadre here that they could be run just as profitably if the employees were paid $15.00 an hour, I’d really like to see y’all actually proving it, through doing it.
You know what WalMart does? It makes its customers wealthier! I understand that concept is anathema to my friends on the left, but if a working class family has $100 to spend, they can buy more with that $100 at WalMart than almost anyplace else. In real terms, that is greater wealth.
Now, we could try changing the rules, and increasing WalMart’s labor costs, but the result of that will have to be that WalMart must increase its prices to cover the increased costs. That means that the working class family’s $100 won’t buy quite as much at WalMart, and that means they are poorer, in real terms.
Let’s talk real economics: it isn’t the concept of raising the minimum wage that your want, not of all that does is trigger inflation which wipes out the value of the higher wage rate, but a changing of the real compensation that employees receive to a higher percentage of corporate earnings, at the expense of the corporations’ — and their shareholders’ — profits.
The trouble with that is that modern technology has changed the relationship between capital and labor. Even in the lower-end employers like WalMart, computers and scanners have replaced the check-out clerk’s previous duty of entering the price of every sold item that goes down the belt. Cashiers can scan items faster, so fewer of them are needed, and less training and knowledge on the part of the cashiers are needed. You get to the industrial side, and where Ford used to need real welders and sheet metal workers and upholsterers, now they need (far fewer) people who can run the robots who do most of that work. The training and knowledge that the auto workers need is less. The mostly liberal Bill Gates has, certainly unintentionally, reduced the need to numbers and training of the American worker.
Were we a closed market, perhaps we could legislate away that loss of the need for labor, but we are not: if we try to so-nobly increase real wages through the law, we start to find American products costing more vis a vis imports . . . which is a large part of the reason WalMart became so successful in the first place.
Of all the unsupported and simply made up gibberish Dana has spouted here – this takes the cake. “You know what WalMart does? It makes its customers wealthier! ”
I guess it kinda/sorta makes sense if you can’t see past the register price for a roll of toilet paper. Or if you can’t think critically, can’t discern fact from fiction and rely on the right’s pantheon of hucksters and blow-hards for your daily talking points.
For everyone else, this is transparent nonsense.
It makes its customers wealthier!
This is stone cold stupid. WalMart’s model specifically relies on taxpayers subsidizing WalMart in multiple ways — so that WalMart’s customers pay for their goods three times. One payment via their taxes, the other payment at the register, and the third when you have to come back in a few months to replace to items that no longer work. All WalMart does is give people an illusion of being wealthier so they can be suckered into buying more stuff they don’t need.
Well, it appears that WalMart’s customers believe that shopping there is to their economic advantage. Should I believe you, or should I believe the judgements of the millions of people who shop there?
I don’t think that anyone shopping at WalMart thinks it makes them any wealthier. It takes a neoconservative of the wingnut variety to try to push the idea that wealth=shopping. Even the people shopping at WalMart understand that wealth doesn’t come from bags of crap at any store.
Even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, Dana is going to continue to believe whatever he currently believes. That is the essence of modern conservatism.
And that is why I’m done with him. Handing him his ass everyday has gotten boring very quickly.
“Well, there sure seem to be a lot of other people who believe that buying a franchise from Wendy’s or McDonald’s is the way that they can succeed in business.”
There are a lot of people who think Obama is a socialist, too. A lot of people — just about half, in fact — have below-average intelligence.
Your lack of understanding of the actual business world makes this conversation difficult. My point was that if I were to start a restaurant, the worst possible deal for me would be to buy into a franchise. Yes, you can make a lot of money, but you have very little control of anything about the business. You serve as one of the robots you mention.
“You know what WalMart does? It makes its customers wealthier! I understand that concept is anathema to my friends on the left, but if a working class family has $100 to spend, they can buy more with that $100 at WalMart than almost anyplace else. In real terms, that is greater wealth.”
Except that WalMart creates its low prices by destroying the very working-class jobs, leaving the people who used to make middle-class wages able to buy nothing but the low-quality goods at WalMart. I understand that’s a concept beyond the capacity of my friends on the right.
“it isn’t the concept of raising the minimum wage that your want, not of all that does is trigger inflation which wipes out the value of the higher wage rate, but a changing of the real compensation that employees receive to a higher percentage of corporate earnings, at the expense of the corporations’ — and their shareholders’ — profits.”
First, that’s not all it does. As someone above noted, look up Australia. And second, bingo. Our overpopulated world will always give us an oversupply of labor, so in a truly free market you’d always have people underbidding each other for low-skill jobs. While that might suit your view of paradise, it seems to me a recipe for revolution. And remember, the capital class is keeping more of its profit because we changed the rules so they pay lower taxes. So please don’t pretend that our setting of the rules hasn’t had an important role in creating our current wage stagnation for the working classes.
Third, so what? I own stocks, and I’m willing to see lower profits in exchange for a more stable society. If you weren’t so short-sighted, you might be willing to do the same.
You seem unaware that the mechanization of production poses a true challenge to capitalism as currently practiced. There are currently three times more people looking for work than there are jobs available, and there is no sign that will change anytime soon (unless and until today’s GOP decides to follow the internal-improvement program of the Whigs instead of the fear-and-loathing recipe of the Know-Nothings).
And, just as a final fillip, you apparently forget about the days when WalMart used to brag about its products being made in America. That’s how they won the loyalty of the rubes. Once they took the bait, WalMart switched to China, because no manufacturer here could meet the wholesale prices WalMart began to demand.
You should read a bit more about WalMart before you hail its success.
WalMart is a huge recipient of government subsidies especially on a state or local level