Fun! Someone who drank the Kool-Aid and doesn’t understand the context, or statistics, at all. It isn’t about fast food. It is about human beings being treated as wage slaves. I want you to reconcile a few things for me with your argument.
Point 1: Since you used statistics, I will too. Drawing from https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm. There are ~147M employees in the United States. Considering the first quartile median wage, ~67.8M people make less than $40k/yr with the interquartile range biasing heavily towards the bottom (meaning most people in the lower 50% of people making less than $40k/yr are making closer to the bottom than they are the median annual wage). These jobs come from such unskilled areas as Arts, Design, Sports and Media, and Construction and Extraction Operations, aka highly skilled, trained, specialized, and educated people. Now, the current median rental price in the US is $2,052/month. That is $24,624 per year just for rent, or, let me check, 61.56% of a $40k/yr income. You know, the amount of money that 46% of hourly employees in the country do not even make.
Point 2: McDonald’s (and nearly all fast food employees) make over $22/hr in Denmark. They get 401k with matching, 2+ weeks of paid vacation per year, parental leave, and much more, and a Big Mac costs less there than it does here and is made with higher quality ingredients due to the health codes of the EU. Now, please, reconcile that. The corporations know they can easily sustain on what is being demanded by the labor, they just don’t want to.
Point 3: A Big Mac is already creeping towards $15 without them paying a living wage, so what fucking good is that old chestnut of corporate propaganda? It is a blatant threat to make sure the social structures of the country do their work for them of beating down their employees to make sure they stay in line. Same with your whole “skilled labor” argument. It is an artificial divide. My father even tried the “fast food jobs are for teenagers” argument once and got exceptionally deflated when I pointed out that A. they are open and obscenely busy for lunch during school hours, so they have to have adults working there and B. it is beyond illegal to discriminate wages based on age, so they should be paying the adults a living wage for the full-time hours that they dedicate that the company NEEDS to function, and the teenagers deserve to get paid the same because they are putting in the same work as the adults.
I am curious if you have ever worked a fast food job, or any minimum wage job. Especially in the last 20 years.
