According to this story from the ABC’s website, McDonalds are recruiting staff in the Philippines(!) to come and work at their restaurants in north-west WA because they can’t get any staff in Australia to work there! :eek:
I think it says almost as much about the state of things in the Philippines if people there are prepared to migrate to Australia for the chance to work in an American-based Fast Food chain…
Not a good development at all, IMO.
If everyone’s employed already and McDonald’s can’t hire Australian staff without raising wages and benefits, that’s good for Australia isn’t it? The article describes it as a labor shortage, but isn’t that just another way of writing “Australia has total employment, hell, we could absorb a bunch of unskilled labor and still have total employment!” Sucks for McDonald’s, though; how high is the Australian wage for unskilled labor that it’s cheaper to hire folk from overseas?
12.75 AUD per hour for adult full-time workers, significantly less if you’re not adult or full-time (I’m not sure if there actually IS a minimum wage for underage/part-time workers, but my rational side tells me there’s gotta be). In any case, I’m 17 and work at Hungry Jack’s (casual) for about 9 AUD an hour. A part-time worker my age would get something closer to $6. I believe McDonald’s has maginally higher wages than Hungry Jack’s. $12 is quite a bit higher than than many countries both in face value and practical worth. I think if they’ve got a shortage of teenage workers for whatever reason then running a fast food joint is going to get pretty expensive pretty quickly.
This conference excerpt (PDF warning) from the Reserve Bank of Australia, seems to indicate that their average unemployment rate (at least as of 1998) tends to hover at around 8% with its peak hitting around 11% in the early 1990s. Another document (PDF warning) from the same source gives a chart of unemployment rates for both educated and uneducated workers from '79 through ‘97. According to tihs page from the Australian Department of Consumer and Employment Protection (DOCEP) lists current minimum wage rates which seem to be pretty well tiered as compared to North American standards. Based on these it seems as though McDonalds’ most economically viable option is to hire kids under 16 years of age, though I am sure they could still get on hiring 16 and 17-year-olds while still staying within the same wage scale as their North American branches. Older than that though and they are starting to get into management pay scales, so I’d say it’s not so much that Australia is “fully stocked” employee-wise, just that there may not be a sufficient number of employees in the age bracket they want to hire from.
It’s in a mining area in the northwest, and mining in that part of the world is highly profitable and highly mechanised. So if you can get a semi-skilled job for one of the mining companies you’ll probably pull in about 5 times what you’d get for working at MickeyD’s. Living costs are probably a bit higher than you’ll pay in Perth – especially for fresh fruit and vegetables, which would have to be brought in from a long way away – and there won’t be much to do in town, except drink beer with your work mates. And it helps if you like a hot, arid climate, too.
And if I were a young Filipina I’d actually be reasonably attracted to the deal, because it would give me a chance to meet some young and unattached Australian men making good money in the mines.
Given that the Reserve Bank of Australia today raised its main interest rate to 6%, the highest in 5 1/2 years, and said inflationary pressures have increased, I wouldn’t necessarily view what seems to me to be a sign of tightness in the labor market as a good thing. (Disclaimer: IANA economist.)
Calgary is going the same way - there aren’t enough workers here to fill all the entry level, service type positions. Or professional positions, actually. My husband’s company is in construction, and they are in negotiations with Immigration Canada to go recruiting abroad.
Anybody in a depressed area in the U.S. want to work? Come on up.
Dang it, I was going to mention the restaurant closures and cut-backs that we’ve been experiencing - Burger King, Saturday afternoon, and the restaurant is closed due to lack of staff (only the drive-through is open). Very strange.
I was the President of the Board of Directors of my local library here in Colorado for a number of years in the late 80’s/early 90’s. We had the same situation. We couldn’t hire regular unskilled help for anything (people working the circulation desk, shelving books, working with children’s programs, etc. These people could get jobs in any number of tech/telecom companies for double or triple what we could offer.
We were forced to close the libraries a couple nights a week and on Sundays. It was unbelievable.
Those days now seem like a long, long, time ago.
It’s important to remember the economic and geographical setting here. WA is isolated. The Nth West spectacularly so. The resources industry and tourism is all there is in terms of modern economic development. There is no rural workforce. Miners are flown in.
WA is booming. Its growth rate is about 10% due to demand for its commodities from China. (This is far in excess of the rest of Australia which has a more varied economic base.)
Of course Maccas is going to have trouble staffing its places. It’s pretty much the same thing as you’d expect trying to staff a Maccas on an oil rig in the middle of the ocean. And of course people from poor countries would be willing to come. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world living on less than a couple of US dollars a day.
Oh I don’t know, Krusty Burger seemed to manage just fine! 
Been listening to the radio lately, featherlou? McDonald’s is not just advertising on the radio for staff (job ads on the radio!), but they’re also offering scholarships to their teen employees. Whodathunkit?
I know of a Burger King that is also closed due to lack of staff. C’mon up if you need a job, folks; I haven’t been able to have a Whopper in ages…
Fight my ignorance, please. Why is this so? The US is a large country, yet I can buy fruits and veggies at roughly the same price nation-wide. Why can’t the produce be shipped effeciently by rail or air?
The lesson I draw from this about America is:
If immigrants weren’t already flooding across our borders of their own volition, we’d have to ship them in.
America get a good deal from our immigrants, especially our illegals. . They pay their oen travel, and in many cases they’re so afraid they won’t sign up for social services. As a bonus, since they’re here illegally, we get to toss them out if they get too uppoty (like trying to unionize).
North-Western WA is similar in remoteness to North-West Alaska. It’s a LONG way from anywhere, there’s not necessarily a rail link, and there’s not enough people to justify even weekly flights laden with fresh fruit and vegies. It’s all gotta come in by refridgerated truck, which takes time and costs money.
To add to that: the US is much more densely populated than Australia (31 people per square km vs 2.6 people per square km*). Then add to that the fact that Australia’s population is very urbanised (about 85%) and there are very few medium sized places. It’s a few cities of more than a million, then a handful of a hundred thousand, then tiny place. Pretty much everybody lives in the coastal sweet that runs from Brisbane to Adelaide. Check out the map with the (thousand person) dots on this page.
Karratha is just a little bit Nth east of the Westernmost part of the continent. It’s 1500km from Perth, which is itself pretty isolated.
*[sub]Although as you can see from the list, the US itself is not particularly densely populated relative to the rest of the world.[/sub]
Some of us already know about McDonalds’ recruiting woes.
How many workers do they need? I live in Texas and I bet there’s some folks here who’d be willing to ship a few your way.
According to the TV, they’re looking for eight Managers- and your point has already made by the Union people here, to the effect that are almost certainly eight people in Australia with the necessary skills who could be persuaded to relocate to the middle of nowhere to run a McDonalds, but McDonalds just isn’t prepared to pay enough for that to happen…
EIGHT? eight? wait… did you say 8? I thought y’all needed a LOT of help. We’ve got probably 8 million immigrants looking for work. Sorry, I shoulda done some research.