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That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. What they're supposed to do is work as burger flippers while going to school, getting an education or learning a trade, and otherwise generally improving their circumstances and advancing their careers. If they're still burger flippers at age 40 then they're there because of their own poor life decisions and lack of initiative. I make an exception for retirees who have decided that they want or need to go back to work to supplement their incomes, but thats the only exception.
I worked at plenty of crappy burger flipper type jobs when I was a kid, started at $3.35 an hour in the early 1980s, but I certainly never intended that to be my peak earning years! It was a good learning experience that taught me the value of a hard days work, and the value of the money that I earned. In other words, it served as a good starting point, nothing more. That's all a job like that is supposed to be, a starting point. I guess today jobs like this only teach people how to **** and moan about how bad they have it - or rather tweeting their complanints on their $400 iPhones.
You don't see any difference between then and now? Tuition for anything meaninful is six figures all up. If you spend less you can fughedaboutit. Even those who spend more and actually get the paper don't have an automatic entre into gainful employment. That is the now of things, just in case you really didn't know.
The identical burger flipper in a place like Germany or Holland makes 3x per hour what the burger flipper here does and they do not have to use a single dime of their take home pay for their health or dental care. Often, not even their housing! They absolutely do not need to spend six figures getting education beyond high school and, because the big national employers are not hiring H1B's as fast as they can get the authorizations a bright young Dutch kid with advanced education does not need to compete with burger flippers for fast food jobs for which they are grossly overqualified anyway.
In America the myth simply will not die that everyone is just some hard work away from being a Neurosurgeon! You started as a Burger Flipper? Well I didn't. I started as a Bank Teller. I've never done fast food or gas station or landscaping or any other kind of blue collar work. I notice you didn't say what, exactly you do now. Hmmmm. Don't bother tell us now. I for one am not going to believe you. I see people riding buses and trains going to work and they have the mental age of 9 or 10. These people have been @#$@# on by the Universe but we put them to work and insist that they "eat bread by the sweat of their brow"... ... in a truly civilized country these people would be taken care of much better. They would work if they want to or not but they wouldn't have to make their way in a very violent and unsafe world all alone for hours at a time because this country doesn't want to pay people to look out for them.
In my Utopia people would get paid, and paid well, to do a LOT of things for which there is a definite need. About the only jobs anyone thinks are important are oil, gas and coal industry. Registered nurses can't find jobs except in the Military. Hospitals would rather work the nurses they have to exhaustion. There is plenty of revenue in the McDonald's food chain to pay the flippers better than $7.25/hr. In Europe they have to. They manage to stay afloat. I have relatives that are career fast food workers. It is not a shameful circumstance. Thinking so is where the harm starts to enter into it.
Why? Can you expound on this statement? Are they of less value than other individuals like real estate agents, or car salesmen?
No, burger flippers are not of less value than any other human being, but the work that they perform is worth less than work performed in most other professions, and they are paid accordingly. What don't you understand about that?
No, burger flippers are not of less value than any other human being, but the work that they perform is worth less than work performed in most other professions, and they are paid accordingly. What don't you understand about that?
If you work as a waitress for a greasy spoon diner you work as hard, maybe harder than server at a fine dining establishment. The server will likely make more money. Much more. Some of the incredible money to be made at a truly fabulous eatery trickles down to even the servers. Maybe even the busboys. That is the way it has always been and a restauranteur who hopes to pay servers at the equivalent of Tavern On The Green what a truck stop waiter makes just won't last. Just for being a burger flipper at McD's vs Jack In The Box should come with a wage increase because of the relative profiles of the two franchises. Does it? Nope. Minimum wage is minimum wage across all fast food platforms. NYC has a cost of living index of 216. It is hands down the most expensive place to live in the entire country. By a wide margin. A HUGE margin. NYC's minimum wage is at the Federal Minimum of $7.25/hr and NYC took their sweet time getting there holding out for extension and exemption after exemption appeal. Portland, Oregon's minimum wage is $8.90/hr. well above the Federal minimum. Oregon's COL is 107. Seattle, WA ratified a $15.00/hr minimum wage which will eventually apply to burger flippers!!! Imagine it! 15.00/hr to flip burgers. You don't think they should get that much? Fine, tell landlords they cannot charge $1,000/mo. rent in depressed parts of town where burger flippers usually have to live.
Its simple this "worth" stuff. Without flippers McD's cannot be McD. The flipper has just as much, maybe more, worth to McD than... a Marketing Analyst. American Capitalists fight this acknowledgement of this basic fact. America was founded upon free labor ideologies. Slaves were being readied for shipment to America before the plantations where they would work were even complete. Americans have NEVER wanted to properly compensate laborers and this mindset has trickled down to even the workers themselves. Most burger flippers would not want $15.00/hr. they don't think they deserve it. They die because they aren't making enough money but they fight tooth and nail to prevent unionization or any other kind of activism that might increase their wages.
In 2014 $7.25/hr is tantamount to slavery. Where labor abuse is really acute is in the salaried professions. An airline pilot in 2014 makes the same as an airline pilot in 1970 adjusted for inflation. Everything a pilot eats, drives or lives in costs 20x more than in 1970 but that is modern Crony Capitalism for you. Moreover, the modern pilot will be spending so many hours behind the wheel at a fixed annual salary of 50K that the hourly wage will approach minimum wage in many carriers and there are junior pilots on food stamps! Most airlines are about as profitable as any entity can be in 2014 but they are fighting tooth and nail to further cut pilot salaries and reduce the safety caps that limit how many hours in a week a pilot can fly to extract even more productivity from them. Are pilots worthless too? I know they don't usually have MBA's or Ed.D's but... is the profession useless to society? Microsoft is in the process of laying of 18K skilled workers. Simultaneously with this they are appealing the caps on in sourced H1B workers that exist. These caps have already been reivised upwards before but are still too low to satisfy Microsofts shareholders. Perfectly good American tech workers being shown the door and then Microsoft with a straight face tells Congress there just isn't enough qualified labor force out there we simply have to drain India and China of their tech talent to satisfy our demand for lower wage, exploitable and disposable highly skilled labor.
Look, there is a large group of Americans who genuinely have no problem consigning other human beings to wage slavery. Even though we are the wealthiest country that has ever existed in the history of the world and even though GDP per full-time-worker in this country is OVER $100k, there is a sense that the poor and those who can't find work and even those who've had bad luck are "not my problem".
We are a nation obsessed with individualism and we assume - even in the face of directly adverse proof - that every person somehow gets what they deserve. And to many, what people who do thankless jobs deserve is nothing but a lifetime of stress and borderline misery.
Where labor abuse is really acute is in the salaried professions. An airline pilot in 2014 makes the same as an airline pilot in 1970 adjusted for inflation. Everything a pilot eats, drives or lives in costs 20x more than in 1970 but that is modern Crony Capitalism for you.
I don't find a lot of it defensible...but reading that part kinda indicates you don't understand inflation. If everything he eats, drives, or lives in is 20X more then in 1970....then his salary adjusted for inflation is also 20X. IE hes making the same effectively.
Did you mean to say something different?
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