Some, maybe, but I don’t see any reason for it.
I know a number of people in both fast food and causal level dining that are desperate for employees, and are not finding them. They want to hire people, and have raised their pay substantially, but people just aren’t applying for the jobs.
The ones who do, often work for a couple weeks, then quit. It may be the case with this individual that employers say him as unlikely to be a long enough term employee to make it worth hiring.
That could pretty much sum all up the stupid shit we’ve seen in the last four years. What reason was there for the vast majority of Trumpistas to come out against proper pandemic procedures?
There are now a lot of people in the US who are willing to cut their nose off to spite their face. A lot of business owners don’t want to “establish a precedent” that their employees should be paid more.
You can even see comments like that here on The Dope, in the other thread about the Nahployment Crisis. At least one poster was seriously concerned that if they started paying more right now, because there’s a serious shortage of workers, they’d have to continue paying more in the future, because the workers would expect that.
Sure, it makes no sense, but it’s out there.
There are two points that evidently have never occurred to you–
Where are the cheaper competitors getting their employees?
Well, yes, there’s that, but my actual reaction is, so the fuck what? Raise the fucking prices, or, here’s a thought, take less fucking profit (which you’ll note is something “that evidently has never occurred to” the business owners or their shills), or go the fuck out of business. If it’s really impossible to make a profit from a fucking McDonalds ( McDonald’s annual gross profit for 2020 was $9.752 Billion) then your shitty assed business should go out of business, and leave room for businesspeople who know what the fuck they’re actually doing.
Flex! My apartment complex is doing it, too. Luckily I have stayed working this entire time so don’t need to do this.
Whether or not McDonald’s the corporation makes a profit does not necessarily have direct bearing on the profitability of any individual restaurant. (In fact, if McDonald’s didn’t take a cut (or took a smaller one) from any restaurant’s profits/revenues, some restaurants might turn from unprofitable to profitable.) This is like claiming that since any MLM company like Amway or Herbalife are making insane profits, any individual that tries and fails to make money in MLM is just too stupid to do so. Most people who try to make money using MLM don’t make very much, if at all. Many MLMs are basically pyramid schemes.
Even before the pandemic, I often heard that most restaurants were working with very thin margins. That’s not to say some (many?) couldn’t raise wages (and prices). Would be interesting to see data on the proportion that could do so while still staying in bussiness vs those that could not.
So why is the solution to a lack of profitability of your local franchise to pay workers less? If the corporation is taking so much out of the franchise that the individual owner can’t make a profit, they either need to close that location, or tell the corporation to take the hit.
Generally, we require a minimum of $500,000 of non-borrowed personal resources to consider you for a franchise. There are limited opportunities to enter the program with less cash available, and in some situations the financial requirements may be substantially higher depending on the specifics of the transaction.
Even getting into a franchise, you need to have a lot of money on hand. These “poor” owners you are worried about are already rich.
So why is the burden of “profitability” always being laid solely on the lowest-paid people in the organization?
Sounds to me like the companies haven’t learned their lesson yet; if you offer the same BS and crappy pay, people aren’t going to work for it, and their jobs are going to remain open.
I keep feeling like if some fast food joint would just offer $3-4 above minimum, they’d be able to pick and choose who they hired. Of course, that would probably require them to offer similar raises (plus a little for seniority) for existing workers, and that might even require (gasp!) raising prices, which is probably the reason they persist in expecting people to work for the beans they’re willing to offer.
At some point, something has to give. I would have thought it would be the depletion of stimulus funds, but that seems to have come and gone without a peep, and whatever’s going on is more structural. So my guess is that employers are going to have to raise wages to attract employees, whether they like it or not.
I know a general manager for a Wendy’s that is paying $14 an hour to start, still can’t find anyone.
They really don’t have anyone there as is, and the few they do they’ve already given raises to.
These people have been catered to since Reagan. What do you expect?
Remember the people who were reflexively always against unions? They still exist. They maybe don’t talk as much any more, since unions have lost so much power, but they’re still out there. Their mindset has been catered to for decades on end. That isn’t going to go away right away. You have to work at it. Just like unions weren’t decimated and diminished overnight.
It isn’t laid solely on the lowest-paid people. But in any retail-type business, labor will always be one of the biggest expenses, and in most situations, it’s one of the most easily controllable. Your attitude is akin to mocking people who have a hard time paying increases in rent, taxes, utilities, etc. You’re saying, in effect, “If those people want to remain housed, they should just pony up the money and pay those higher expenses” – totally ignoring the fact that the money may not be readily available.
You seem to have the attitude that a business owner should cavalierly deplete his savings and possibly risk bankruptcy just to keep his business open.
Maybe it’s not pay then. But the question still more or less remains- is it a worker shortage, or a job surplus that’s causing this?
Exactly. Payroll is often one of the largest single expenses for most businesses, and as such, they’re loath to pay any more than the market requires, as that cuts straight into profit.
That is (or was, I suppose) the problem on the lower end of the scale. When you have essentially unskilled people doing very simple jobs, they become fungible from the perspective of the employer. Why pay more, put up with anything, or invest much in them, if you can find someone who is functionally identical from an employment perspective? Someone’s not on time? Find another person just like them. Someone mouths off too much? Shit can them and find someone else who is willing and able to do that job for the wage you offer.
I’m not sure what the answer is- it’s probably a higher minimum wage that’s linked to some sort of economic growth indicators. Economically, there’s no reason to pay these people more- there’s nothing to warrant paying them any more than you have to.
This is an economic transaction, not a charity. They’re being paid a wage they’re willing to work for, in exchange for their labor. If they feel like they’re being ripped off, they’re free not to work that job/quit, or they can get other skills that let them distinguish them from the rest of the faceless minimum wage ranks, and thereby command higher wages.
Right now, that “than you have to” part from above is the telling piece. Sure, they’re fungible, but if there aren’t enough workers to go around, you either pay more, or you figure out some other way to do things- automation, smaller menu, productivity improvements (although I sort of suspect that low hanging fruit has been long since plucked), etc…
McDonald’s profit has been going up because of the pandemic, and because the high cost of labor drove them to laying off more than half the work force in the past few years, even before the pandemic.
I expect the average income of McDonald’s workers to go up, because they are transitioning to a model where a locatiin will have a handful of supervisory employees overseeing the automation, and their wages will be higher because they have more capital investment behind them.
When McDonalds had 450,000 employees and $6 billion in gross profit, the total profit was $13,000 per employee. But out of that money they have to pay for capital investment, dividends, investment in company retirement plans, etc. And this was way before the ‘fight for $15’, when salaries were lower.
Once employee pay started going up, it was inevitable that McDonalds would automate and lay off a lot of them. Tanstaafl.
If that’s the future you want, where there are no entry level jobs any more, pushing for unreasonable salaries and benefits for the lowest workers in the chain will get you there. Let’s cut off the bottom rung on the ladder of prosperity and make young people wards of the state with a UBI instead. That will make everything better.
Since it’s inception, McDonald’s has worked very hard to make sure they only had to provide minimal training to their employees to ensure that they’re easily replaceable and they’ve had their eyes on automation for years now. Even before the Great Resignation, McDonald’s and other fast food companies were headed for automation.
Also, who thinks of McDonald’s fry cooks or cashiers as entry level positions? An entry level position is the lowest rung in an organization you can expect to progress in. Starting out as an HR Assistant is an entry level position providing you an opportunity to move into recruiting, benefits, or some sort of generalist position. Most people don’t look at a job at McDonald’s as coming with an opportunity to turn it into a career. Though, yeah, some people do move into management.
Entry level jobs are simply jobs you can get that do not require any experience. Working at a McDonalds can show other employers that you are willing to work, and gives them a reference they can check to make sure you aren’t a lousy employee.
The people that benefit most from the bottom rung are immigrants, minorities, and poor people without connections or references. Thad and Muffy will be just fine - their important and wealthy parents can pull strings and get them in the door at good companies. For those who have no support and no work experience, McDonalds and other similar jobs give them a start and an ability to prove themselves. They are a critically important part of upwards mobility for the poorest and most disadvantaged.
So the future you want is one in which we will forego automation that would increase productivity and wealth while decreasing the human toiling needed at jobs that are not worthwhile or enriching, and to do this, we need to ensure that the people who have these undesirable jobs are paid a pittance so that they will cost less than increasingly cheaper and more capable automation. Because otherwise there’s a moral hazard that they have an opportunity to share in the massive wealth brought to us by this technological innovation across society, which would give them the freedom to pursue more meaningful work and not toil away in undesirable low status, low meaning, and increasingly low necessity jobs?
I never said anything of the sort. If automation makes sense and is cost effective, people will automate. Nothing wrong woth that. But if you artifically force a wage to be $15/hr, and the current wage for the job is $10/hr but automation can be done for $12/hr equivalent, your pushing for the higher wage will force automation that is less efficient than a $10/hr worker, but more efficient than a $15/hr worker.
So a few workers get more pay, many more are fired, the company loses profit, and a number of entry level jobs are permanently destroyed.
The destruction of miserable entry level jobs that no one wants to work is something to celebrate, not lament. It’s a good thing when we can generate as much or more wealth with less human toil. That’s one of the most fundamental ways in which human civilization progresses. If we had zero fast food workers because we made robots perfectly capable of doing the job - fantastic.
The problem is the neo-feudal ideology we live under that believes that this new found wealth and productivity should only benefit a very tiny fraction of society that will own all of it and that everyone else should be grinded into the dirt because they are only suitable for toil, and if toil isn’t needed anymore, then they have no use.
Worrying that automation will take away low pay, meaingless work and that this will negatively impact those at the bottom only makes sense if you implicitly buy into that ideology. It is perverse. It essentially frames you as looking out for the benefit of those at the bottom because you’re worried their jobs will be taken away and they’ll no longer have any use and therefore we will have to discard them and mistreat them, rather than celebrating the fact that we can all have more with less misery if our society was at all socially equitable.