Fast Food workers picketing outside of Krystals on Moreland Ave (Atlanta: section 8, renting)

[SAAN]

Lets start a rally for a $30hr Corporate minimum wage, since fast food workers want $15hr for having no skills.

[tikigod311]

Originally Posted by ATLTJL

Wow, if I knew that Church's managers made enough to live in big houses and drive around in Lexuses, i would have gone into fast food a long time ago!!!

Yeah, I clearly took the wrong path in life.

[Carolina Knight]

Originally Posted by jsvh

Higher minimum wage results in higher unemployment and higher prices.

Institute a basic income and get rid of all the government programs. That will force employers to pay fair prices to attract workers to unappealing jobs since workers are not forced to take them to qualify for other assistance needed just to survive.

Increased costs of living and wages of laborers not keeping up pace have caused businesses to see decrease in business and higher costs of products to make profit. This is the wrong, liberal solution to follow.

If businesses want to stay in business and pride themselves in service to keep and grow business, they need to be properly staffed to handle business. If they want to remain shorthanded unable to handle business effectively, they will struggle.

I do not work in the fast food industry. I work in a position where I am not paid much. I do have marketable skills and talent to do other things. There is not a market for what I am able to do. Instead of seeking more pay, I find ways to improve myself in skills and talent when an opportunity comes.

[SAAN]

Originally Posted by ATLTJL

Wow, if I knew that Church's managers made enough to live in big houses and drive around in Lexuses, i would have gone into fast food a long time ago!!!

Who are these people talking about? A store manager at a Church's doesn't possibly make enough money to buy a Lexus and a nice house. Probably not even a regional manager...MAYBE the guy who actually took a risk and invested his OWN MONEY into the franchise would make enough to do that. But that's life, right? No risk, no reward. The owner invested his own money and risked losing it all, so if he succeeds and buys a Lexus, good for him!

Do they really think that $15 an hour is going to be enough to buy a Lexus and a nice house? I seem to recall still being pretty damn far away from those things when I passed the $15/hour mark!

Exactly $13-15hr is the rock bottom minimum to just survive and live in a decent place.

[waronxmas]

For all those aghast at the fast food workers asking for higher wages, don't be. In fact, you should applaud them as they have done something all of us who aren't at the executive level in corporate America have experiencing too for the last 30 years or so: stagnate wages.

Rather than getting in a length post, read this Op-Ed from the Wall Street journal and ask yourself if the prevailing corporate culture in this county is doing right by you even if you are educated and working in a high paying job. Chances are, you are not.

Stagnant Wages Crimping Economic Growth - WSJ.com

[JPD]

Originally Posted by jsvh

Plus if you raise min wage it will cause more of those people to be unemployed.

You'll need to support that with some hard evidence. Sometimes things that sound logical are actually wrong. Costco somehow manages to pay great wages and still turns a hefty profit. If you pay more, you get better employees who work for you for longer periods of time. This helps offset the cost of increased wages to the employer.

Also, by paying more, it puts more money in the local economy, which INCREASES the number of jobs since all that extra money being spent will result in increased demand for products and the people and places that sell them. In addition to that, if you have good employees who have worked for you for a long time and feel like they're being paid a good wage, it's going to create a situation where your customers are happier and will be more likely to continue supporting your business.

$15 is probably asking too much, but a substantial increase is long overdue and I support this strike.

[residinghere2007]

Originally Posted by tikigod311

I take exception to this. They have very little value in comparison to people in managment. For the most part, they just applied for the job. They brought no value other than the ability to do menial tasks. The managers get paid because of their experience and ability to continue making money for the business.

Its a job MARKET and in a market you have to have value to be successful. If you have little to add, you should expect little in return. Now, one should use that low paying opportunity add to their value. Thats how it has been done and I don't really see anything wrong with that.

This minimum income supplied by the government idea is interesting, I don't know quite how to feel about that one yet. But it sounds very wrong off the bat. Im open minded though!

I take exception to your view as well. The fact remains that managers do not do the day in and day out work that the expediters and cashiers perform. The front line employees are the "face" of the business. And contrary to what you seem to believe, many of them do have experience doing the jobs that they are performing along with customer service skills.

I understand about job markets and marketing yourself. But being that I actually do work in mid management and I have a staff beneath me and executives above me, I know for a fact that at many organizations the executives do nothing but go to meetings, come back and tell lower level employees what do to. My own boss rarely checks on me or doesn't even know what I am doing most of the time and doesn't know how to do my job, let alone hers most of the time. She has to depend on me and my co-workers, including our clerks and receptionists and admin assistance and customer service reps to get the actual work done. One could say that she is "managing" us, but really she is not since we are not in a retail sort of environment. If she has to report something to her superior from my department, she has me do it for her and then it is given to her superior and she doesn't even check it lol. FWIW, I love my boss, I actually like that she is not a micromanager, but she is an example of someone who depends greatly on her employees. She is lucky in that she has a staff that is very focused on work and compliance. I am a stickler for semi-micro managing my own staff so our department is run very smoothly.

I have worked in fast food before in college. It is a demanding job both physically and mentally and it does require one to have a particular skillset to do a good job at it, especially in regards to customer service. Many restaurants fail due to the culture of service at their locations. If one hires a good, qualified staff, and I would assume all those working at Krystal qualify being that they were hired there, then you don't have to worry about losing profits based on high turnover of bad employees.

Everyone in an organization has some value. If they didn't they would not be there. Fire all of those workers at Krystal and Krystal will shut down - that is their value right there, they literally ARE Krystal and IMO they should be compensated better or at least offered benefits that get them off social welfare programs.

I wrote somewhere else, not sure if it was here, but I actually feel it is crazy that so many corporate types don't remember the history of the labor struggles in our country. They were at times very violent and dramatic and were primarily based on the large gap between rich and poor prior to the mid 20th century. If they were as smart as they should be based on their college degrees they should know that happy employees are well appreciated, compensated employees and for those who work in retail/service industries they should want to pay their employees more to keep the good ones and create more economic growth in general.

Originally Posted by tikigod311

Waste of a white skin man huh, Ill take that as a good hearted jab. But seriously, if you think you have some significant privilege in the job market just by being white, you are sorely mistaken.

Doing alright now, but really not much better than what these folks flipping burgers want though!
$15 an hour is $31,200 a year full time!!!!! Shoot, if they pass this, I may as well quit and enjoy the benefits of working at Krystals! Get fat and die off chili cheese fries and corn pups. Sounds like a good life to me!

LOL, at the waste of white skin. My grandma used to say that about, what she called (and what others call) "poor white trash."

Basically though it means that due to your white skin, you are looked on more positively than most black people who may have education and experience greater than your own. There have been studies that show that college educated, qualified, non-criminal black job seekers are passed up versus a white person (especially as it relates to black males and white males) who has lower education, less experience, and a criminal record to boot.

Personally these prejudicial attitudes even popped up in this thread being that many are generalizing these workers are being uneducated criminals. You never know someone's circumstances or them individually just by reading a blurb from a media rag. Like I said, I worked in fast food. I would again if I lost my job (I make more than $15 an hour too fwiw). I have made more than I make now years ago and lost that job (after 9/11) and took a job for $8 an hour and was glad to have it even though I have a college degree. I could find nothing else and everyone can potentially fall into bad financial times. None of you are any better than these people working at Krystal who from all accounts are law abiding, hard working people.

[midtown mile girl]

The minimum wage should be enough to cover the basics of living while you try to find something better, or move up with the business.
The problem is that the minimum wage is too small to do that anymore. Rent, food, and transportation costs have shot up in the past few years. The wage should be enough so that the federal government is not having to supplement those wages with food stamps, etc.
Some businesses already pay more than the minimum for entry level jobs.

[BroadStJudge]

Police: Wendy’s employee drops pot in burger

Police: Wendy

[ATLTJL]

Exactly $13-15hr is the rock bottom minimum to just survive and live in a decent place

Gotta disagree with this.

My first job out of college paid LESS THAN $10/hour!

That wasn't because I couldn't find a real job and worked at Target. This was a REAL JOB at a REAL COMPANY doing REAL WORK, 40 hours a week at a major corporate headquarters with benefits. This was a COLLEGE DEGREE job.

Guess what? I wasn't rich. A dinner at a sit down restaurant like Buffalo's was considered eating out NICE. I didn't live large....BUT...I still had enough to survive and not live in a dump.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't live in Shangri-la. I lived in a highly working class area and had a roommate. It was an old townhouse built in the early 80s off I-85 in the part of unincorporated Gwinnett county often referred to as Norcross. It wasn't nice. But it was shelter, it had space, and it was relatively safe (in 4 years we were never broken into). Rent was $750, so we each paid $377.50 per month. I don't think rents in that area are significantly more than that today.

I had to fuel a car to take me to downtown Atlanta every day. In those days, we had to pay LONG DISTANCE fees to call our parents.

Sure, at the time I hated it. But it kept me grounded and humble. So even though today I wouldn't want to go back to that, I know I could. I know how to do it. And I can tell you, $13-$15/hour is NOT rock bottom. By the time I hit $15/hour, I was renting my very own 2 bedroom apartment in a nice, new, modern building in a place where the rents are probably pretty close to where they were back then.

I'm all for a living wage. But let me ask you....if as a college graduate with a professional job, I was making under $10/hour and still managing to survive, why in the world does someone with no education or skills working in a fast food restaurant deserve to earn more?

I'm not against a $10/hour minimum wage, but $15? That's crazy. The food at Krystal will get so expensive you'll be able to eat at Outback or Longhorn for the same price, because guess what....servers never get pay bumps.