A lot of fast food workers went out on a wildcat strike today in several American cities. Fox News’ Niel Cavuto interviewed one of the strikers (via Gateway Pundit):
Shenita Simon: “Those that think we’re making so much money and if we follow a particular type of budget, I can’t afford to pay rent. I can’t afford to feed my children. I can’t even afford the healthcare for my husband. Things that you guys see as everyday life is luxury to me and it’s not fair… I say, why are you the companies, you the franchisees getting raises. You’re making billions and millions of dollars per year. Why can’t we barely survive? Why is it we who are employees, who work, who put in hard sweat, why can’t we survive? Why do we have to go hungry at night? Why can’t we pay rent? Eight dollars, seven twenty-five, seven fifty is not enough.
Neil Cavuto: Is it a fast-food company’s purpose and responsibility to meet pay, to keep up with the living standards of a given city? Is it really up to that organization?
Shenita Simon: It’s their responsibility. Because when they’re cutting our checks, not giving us lunch breaks, you’re not giving us benefits. When you’re doing illegal actions against us. Yes, it’s your responsibility. Because when we’re making the bare minimum, and you’re stealing from us. Of course, we can’t survive…
Indeed, you can’t – an adult with family responsibilities can’t make ends meet while working at a fast food joint at minimum wage. Thing is, such a job is never going to be a job which can support someone with family responsibilities. Such a job is either for a young, entry level worker just getting started in life, or for an elderly person supplementing retirement pay.
It is true that the fast food companies are making quite a lot of money – and you can bet dollars to donuts that the senior executives are rolling in pay and benefits. But if you have ten workers at a fast food joint making $7.50 and hour and “win” your fight to increase pay to $15.00 an hour, all you’ll get is five or less workers manning the store…the other five will be replaced by automation. No matter how you want to slice it up, flipping burgers is just not that valuable an occupation. It is useful work. It is work which needs to be done. It, like all honest work, has inherent dignity. But it is work which just about anyone can do – supply and demand; when there is a very large pool of potential workers for a particular job then there is no rational reason for high wages being paid.
Ms. Simon’s problem is not that fast food work is low paid – her problem is that she’s working there when her skill level should have long ago moved her in to a more difficult and highly paid line of work. There are two explanations for why she hasn’t – and I don’t know which is the more prominent part in her life, and it doesn’t really matter:
1. She’s messed up in her own life to the point where she’s stuck in a dead end, entry level job.
2. The people who run our government – and whom she probably voted for – don’t like having a lot of jobs around which would allow someone like Ms. Simon, if she applied herself, to rise step by step up the employment ladder until she reaches a point where her wages afford a comfortable, middle class life for an adult with family responsibilities.
If Ms. Simon wanted to do something useful, she’d lead a protest demanding Obama stop blocking the Keystone pipeline…and she’d move to those areas of the country which are booming and thus have bags of blue collar jobs available for anyone who is willing to work hard and slowly move up the ladder of success. But, she’s not in to that – either not in to challenging her liberal leaders, or not that in to investing the sweat equity necessary to move from minimum wage to middle class wage work. She wants a free ride – no development of her skills; no challenge to her work ethic, but double the pay she’s getting now.
That is the essential pull of socialism for the lower class – a promise of getting a lot more for doing no more (or even less) than they are now. Of course, if Ms. Simon and those like her really get their way, there won’t be fries with that socialism…not much work would get done, at all…especially as we’d all be too busy lining up for our potato rations…
UPDATE:
Some really great points have been made in the comments and now I’ll step up and defend Ms. Simon a bit. She does, indeed, have a cockeyed view of the world and if she “wins”, then all she’ll do is lose…unless, of course, she becomes an apparatchik passing out the potato rations to the rest of us (socialist revolutionaries fall in to two categories – in the upper echelons, wanna-be Lenins; in the lower ranks those who essentially aspire to be bureaucrats or policemen). But, remember, the world she lives in has not been made by her – that she lives in a world where getting a decent education is becoming increasingly difficult and finding blue collar work with a future ever rarer is because of the design – conscious or not – of the Ruling Class. That this Ruling Class is largely made up of people whom Ms. Simon votes for – and which feeds her the terminology she uses in her battle – is neither here nor there; she is living in their world, and following their script.
In New York City rent control keeps rents high; a miserably bad education system is in the iron grip of the unions which entirely control the city government; high taxes discourage new business formation; various regulations and taxes make manufacturing within the city limits difficult to do at a profit; imported illegal labor ensures that a great deal of the entry-level jobs are priced genuinely too low for a legal American to live on (illegal immigrants are commonly – and illegally and unsafely – jammed very many in to each substandard housing unit); union control of the few genuinely productive areas left (especially the port) ensures that unless you’re juiced in with the union, you ain’t getting a job there. For someone like Ms. Simon, there isn’t much of a chance – she can’t get educated (even if she goes to school – even to college; they won’t teach her), she can’t start her own business, there aren’t any decent blue collar jobs for her to get…so, she’s working at McD’s and is frustrated – and then in the final, sick irony, she’s set out in to the streets by the rhetoric of the very Ruling Class which has set up a system where she is bound to fail, unless she becomes one of their little, Stalinist tools for continued control. Have pity on the poor lady – she knows not what she does.
We have to change this – we have to get in there and start “community organizing”…explaining to the Ms. Simons that her problem is, indeed, a rich, white oppressor…but it ain’t the redneck with his rebel flag painted on his truck…its the upper class liberal with his “equality” sticker on the back of his Prius.
Blogs For Victory 
Dr B
it was LEAD alright that lowered crime rates, just not the lead in paint.
Whoa Hoppen grasshoppoh??
” .. yet we have a soaring murder rate, illegitimacy rate, rampant crime and detroit like communities in every state. ” – Neo
Actually, the illegitimacy rate is also dropping, from 46% in 2011, to 41% in 2012. Teenage women giving birth has dropped from 61 per thousand in 1991 to 31 per thousand in 2012.
Click to access nvsr61_05.pdf
caspy
MORE baloney………
1. LEGAL GUNS, STOP over a MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND reported crimes a year.
2. ABORTIONS stop teenage women for giving birth at unprecedented rates.
More twisted FAUX leftist crap to lul a dumbed down populace into thinking we have no problems in this country.
Casper,
For blacks, 72% of all births are out of wedlock; for Latinos 29%; for whites 17%…these are catastrophic numbers in terms of social pathologies we’ll have to deal with later on as out of wedlock birth is one of the main predictors for ignorance, poverty and criminality. The numbers should be in the low single digits – as they used to be before you liberals deliberately ruined the American family by injecting welfare.
I wanted to point out 2 inconsistencies in progressive rhetoric as regards these fast-food protesters.
1. Michelle Obama is pushing a healthy eating program as her main first lady objective. Plenty of people in both parties are looking to eat out less. If the cost of a big mac goes up 40 cents probably isn’t a financial reason to stop going to BK, but might it not be that extra incentive to get millions of people to eat better, i.e. follow Ms. Obama’s ideals?
2. Watching various protesters I’ve noticed many of them say that 7.25 isn’t enough because they are single moms and have children to support AND have parents to support. One of the bygone era arguments for paying men more than women was that they had families to support and feminists basically said that shouldn’t be an employers concern. Employers took that to heart which is why pay inequality for the same job with the same experience has drastically narrowed, not that women are paid more but men are paid less. So when exactly should an employer pay an employee more based on their family dependents?
I should have said whopper, Big Mac is McDonalds. Excuse me, I’ve been eating out less for years.
Well, there is a great deal I need to address later; however, for the moment I will address these fables of Bardolf2 (v2.0–new & improved version?)
1. Michelle Obama’s healthy eating program in the school system is a complete failure. Lost (as in cost the taxpayers) a couple of a million dollars and the kids will not eat it. The kids prefer to go hungry than to eat the food presented. Now, to be fair, the failure is not hers or her idea–it is one of parenting who never taught their kids to eat properly at home. Nevertheless, it is once again an issue of the people and not government, like. Gov. Bloomberg versus parents, to decide. I have decided not to get into the whining of the PC folks in this response as this is not the place.
2. bygone era arguments appears to be a new argument to old misguided reporting. Aside from your very first job–have you ever accepted whatever the employer stated as the pay? At 15–I got better than minimum wage at the full-service gas station I applied to because I asked. Which blows a hole in your men get paid better than women BS (please don’t show me the studies) — they do but it is because they ask for it. Maybe women (in general) do not negotiate as well but every position I have held in the past 30+ years I have accepted knowing what I was going to get paid (and expectations) via negotiation. There was no “man scale” versus “women scale” listed on the pay scale.
Well, db, to be fair, the “men make more than women”, is true when it comes to the obAMATEUR’s administration.
Now for those who are too lazy and too afraid to find out the truth:
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-who-pays-men-13-more-women-proclaims-equal-pay-day
” If the cost of a big mac goes up 40 cents probably isn’t a financial reason to stop going to BK, but might it not be that extra incentive to get millions of people to eat better, i.e. follow Ms. Obama’s ideals?”
Oh my goodness, what a good idea! Have someone decide what is best for someone else and then come up with a government plan to force people into what their betters have decided they should do.
It is not only brilliant, from one perspective, but it is the very heart and soul of Leftist thought. The problem is, it is the antithesis of the basic principles upon which THIS nation was founded, and which not only guided but determined the form and content of our foundational documents—that is, personal liberty.
Just curious—when and where did men start to be paid “less”?
“So when exactly should an employer pay an employee more based on their family dependents?”
That is an easy one, and the answer is exactly the same as it would be for “So when exactly should an employer pay an employee more based on his gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation/marital status/skin color/family connections/politics ?” And, of course, the answer is “Never”.
Though if an employer mixes number, as in your sentence, starting with a singular and then lurching into a plural, he may not be able to figure this out, either. What is so hard about reframing sentences to make the number agree? While it is a little cumbersome to say “So when exactly should an employer pay an employee more based on his or her family dependents?” it would be quite easy to just make the word “employees” plural—“So when exactly should an employer pay employees more based on their family dependents?”
Just an observation on the semantic infiltration of lowered standards. Your carefree mixing of singular and plural is now so common it is becoming accepted, and I suggest that is because so few even know it is happening.
An interesting article.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-02/this-is-what-would-happen-if-fast-food-workers-got-raises#r=read
Is the idea just to raise the minimum wage for fast food workers? Because the discussion is centered on the rising cost of fast food as the result, and the Leftist consensus is that this is not really so much after all.
But if the minimum wage is to be raised across the board, that would mean the cost of everything would go up as well, so the employee with the new higher wage structure would not necessarily be able to buy more with that additional money, as everything he would want to buy would also cost more.
This would slam the majority of workers, who do not work for minimum wage, as their income would not go up but their expenses would. Eventually, their income would have to be adjusted, because there is an intrinsic value differential among different types of job, and merely changing the wage structure will not alter that. The intrinsic value of a job that now pays $15.00 an hour compared to a burger flipper making $8.00 is not going to change, so eventually the wages or salary of the more skilled worker will rise to keep that ratio intact.
Paying a burger flipper $15.00 an hour is not going to make his skill set suddenly more valuable, it’s only going to pay him more for it, and the bottom line is that the value of different skill sets is what sets the rate of pay. A skill set worth twice as much now is still going to be worth twice as much, no matter what arbitrary numbers are attached to either one.
And the end result will be that the relative costs of things will remain the same, just with bigger numbers. This is called inflation.
According to the “logic” of the Left, if everyone would just get paid the same thing, there would be no poor people—so why not just declare that everyone gets paid $50.00 an hour, no matter what they do?
This reminds me of the Left’s befuddlement when we point out that raising the cost of gasoline and diesel fuel to European levels (to reduce the use of internal combustion engines, doncha know, to save the planet) will result in skyrocketing costs of every single consumer good, from clothes to food.
?????? But gas is not the same as lettuce!!!!! No, but the cost of moving lettuce from one place to another helps determine the cost of that lettuce when it gets to the consumer. It’s these pesky economic details (what we call “facts”) that get in the way of giddy Leftist utopian plans for forcing everyone to skip along to their tune.
Want $15 / hour or more–just one of many articles.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/28/pf/north_dakota_jobs/index.htm
catty
this ISNT about “fast food workers” it IS about the enforced GOVERNMENT MINIMUM WAGE and the drive by the left to push it to $15.00 PH….. as we have ALL stated EVERYBODY then wants to match the RATIO of their pay to the MW.. wages skyrocket and so dose the cost of EVERYTHING leaving the MW earners still on the lowest rung of the ladder..DUHHHH
economics 101
Great minds, etc., neo. You posted this while I was writing my 11:51 post.
BTW, Spook and the lovely Mrs. Spook just left after a too-short three day visit, the first time we have actually met after writing back and forth for so many years, and we did work on solving the problems of the universe, in our spare time.
Oh great time i”ll bet, did you “guys” take any pics?
maybe one of you can share them on E-mail. would be great to see.
A woman agreed to marry Spook?
Just kidding!
Hope you all had a great time – perhaps one of these days all B4V authors and commenters can meet in Vegas…
“…perhaps one of these days all B4V authors and commenters can meet in Vegas…”
ALL? Oh, the horrors. Can we narrow that guest list down a little?
We are baby sitting my son and daughter in law’s two boxers (from hell) one 90 lb male one 60 lb female for a week.plus our fat weiner (no relation) dog and cat, LOL fun times.
953,000 Jobs Created In ’13 — 731,000 Part-Time!
but but but …..IF ONLY……
The Spooks had their new Aussie shepherd pup with them (8 months old) and she and my dog had a fine old time, rumbling and tumbling.
To you and Mark—-I do think we ought to have a meet-and-greet. Right now I am trying to talk the Spooks into going to Saint Louis for the mini-CPAC meeting there at the end of September. If they go, I will fly. Otherwise, I will drive and then swing up their way for a couple of days—-if I can get away that long.
I have met one other blogger, a guy who used to post here, and it would be an interesting couple of days. I have four extra bedrooms, three after I turn one into an office, so we could use my place as a gathering place as well, as it is halfway between neo and Vegas.
I hope you had a great time with the Spook’s!
Thanks….I did. I always wondered how people could form great relationships over the internet, but some of us have had on online discussion group that started out being about politics but which has expanded to birds, guns, cars, family, etc. and when we finally met in person it was like getting back together with old friends. He is the second person from this group I have met, and it was the same both times.
STOP DA MUSIC………….
Rise in violence ‘linked to climate change’
By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service
guess our lefties didnt get the memo…
Rangel: Tea Party Is Bunch Of ‘White Crackers’…
does that make the donks a bunch of dumb……Oh never mind!
Hmmm. Now that we know that to a certain level of black person “cracker” means homosexual, could it be that ol’ Charlie is engaging in anti-gay hate speech?
And “WHITE crackers”? Gee, I thought “cracker” MEANT “white”.
I am so far out of the loop on this race-baiting, I can’t even keep up with the code words any more, and I never did figure out what a dog whistle is supposed to be, other than a way to get the attention of some of the forker females.
That’s just the way it is when you evaluate people as human beings, not as members of a demographic, and when you look at character instead of skin color.