$15 bucks.......................... wha....................

[SignManiac]

Let's not overlook the fact that they are also demanding to be unionized, and I'd bet my bottom dollar they are the real driving force behind this wage demand. The same thing that happened to Detroit will happen to the fast food industry if these strong arm crooks get their claws into this industry.

 

[player]

It is not fair that corporations make billions in profit but the majority of their employees cannot feed their families or pay for health care, dental, rent, etc...

It is sad that Walmart employees had to set up a food bank for employees who can't afford to eat.

 

[neil_se]

Is minimum wage age-dependent in the US?

Here in Aus the national minimum wage is just over $16 per hour, but most industry-specific minimum wages are higher than that. That's for a full-time employee (4 weeks holidays, 2 weeks sick leave per year), casual employees get an extra 25% loading in lieu of these entitlements. Younger workers only get a percentage of that (36.8% for an under-16 yo up to 97.7% for a 20 yo). Plus overtime loading for late hours, weekends, etc.

Signwriters come under the construction industry. For a newly-qualified signwriter minimum full-time wage would be $19.67, which then increases with each year of experience. In reality there wouldn't be many signwriters working for minimum wage, most would be on $25-30 per hour.

 

[GB2]

Gino, seriously, on a professional sign forum you have nothing better to say then complain about the service you got at your local burger joint.....and Fred actually chimed in on this.....unbelielveable?!!

 

[CanuckSigns]

Is minimum wage age-dependent in the US?

Here in Aus the national minimum wage is just over $16 per hour, but most industry-specific minimum wages are higher than that. That's for a full-time employee (4 weeks holidays, 2 weeks sick leave per year), casual employees get an extra 25% loading in lieu of these entitlements. Younger workers only get a percentage of that (36.8% for an under-16 yo up to 97.7% for a 20 yo). Plus overtime loading for late hours, weekends, etc.

Signwriters come under the construction industry. For a newly-qualified signwriter minimum full-time wage would be $19.67, which then increases with each year of experience. In reality there wouldn't be many signwriters working for minimum wage, most would be on $25-30 per hour.

when em I lived in oz a few years ago, I was blown away by the wages! People in call centres were making $25 an hour to start! Mind you the cost of living was much higher in oz than back home.

 

[rjssigns]

As others have alluded to the issue is not so simple. Or maybe it is? What I am driving at is things will remain relative. On another forum I get to hear from people in all parts of the world. Countries that have high minimum wages also have a ridiculously high cost of living.

IIRC Sweden's minimum wage is approaching $21 an hour. People making those wages are struggling and they too are lobbying for higher pay. See where I'm going with this? It has nothing to do with how much their "greedy overlords" profit. It has everything to do with fundamental economic principles.

You cannot arbitrarily raise one sectors wages without incurring unintended and potentially disastrous effects to other segments of the economy.

 

[rydods]

I believe part of the solution is creating new jobs. There is definitely a lack of them out there which has forced the government to re-evaluate what's left. Also, with the lack of jobs has brought a negative mindset to some people that there's nothing left so no job or a minimum wage job is the best available BUT "I need to provide for my family" and face it, we're all going to have to pickup the "slack" to cover this.
Machines are taking a lot of the jobs people used to do and that's just the way things are and we are way behind on adjusting to this.
Kids are smarter in a lot of ways but if you ask a 12th grader to count change without a calculator, it can't be done and don't get me started on their attitudes because of the lack of harsher consequences in school.
And now you have a kid knows a lot about fixing a computer and received A's in school who just "knocked up" a young woman and now needs more, and a 55 yr Baby boomer who lost his job because the mill shut down needing more. We need more...more for people to do. Minimum wage should be a stepping stone to "larger things" but we need a lot "more larger things".

 

[bob]

...These employees make these operations BILLIONS of dollars. That isn't a typo. McDonalds alone is one of the Worlds Largest Corporations. So, these workers deserve better pay...

...remainder of screed mercifully deleted...

Try to follow along, as difficult for you as that may be...

In a free market, the relationship between an employer and an employee is an agreement between those two alone. For any position, an employer offers a wage at a rate which will ultimately make him more money that it will lay out in wages for that position. To do otherwise is insanity. The employee agrees to sell its time for the wage offered. There is no coercion on either side and either side can walk away at any time for any reason.

It doesn't matter a whit how much money the employer makes, the only thing that matters is that any given position should add $X to the bottom line thus the wage offered for that position must necessarily be something less than $X. If an organization has a sufficient number of employees and, for the most part, each of them is earning its wage differential, that being the difference between what it earns and what it generates, for that employer, then that employer certainly can make billions. That does not in any way make any particular employee, or set of employees, worth more than their wage differential.

It doesn't matter a whit whether or not the employee can live on the wage being offered. That is not a factor in calculating the wage value of a position. If you need a certain amount of income in order to live, then you really shouldn't consider selling your time for any less than that. Assuming you have some marketable skill. If you do not, is sucks to be you.

An agreement between employer and employee is absolutely positively none of the government's business. When the apparatus mandates a minimum wage virtually all positions with a value less than that number will be eliminated, consolidated, or replaced by automation. A business exists to turn a profit for its proprietors. Without doing so it cannot exist. It is not a charity for low-end employees.

No government nowhere nohow has any right to demand that anyone pay more than something is worth.

 

[Mosh]

Sometimes I wish I made $7 an hour....

 

[signage]

No government nowhere nohow has any right to demand that anyone pay more than something is worth.

The sooner they learn the better off things will be!

 

[royster13]

I don't care about the economy etc.....If you want to make more hour get a education in a skill & get a job.

While your there at that low income job, do your best & you will progress & earn more in the mean time.

Still need more create your own income & do your best

Do you really believe that if all folks got education and skills there would be enough jobs to go around?.....And it all of a sudden more folks decided to be self employed, the amount they could get for the goods and services they sell would "plummet"....

 

[toucan_graphics]

Forget for a moment the innate sense of entitlement that folks experience these days where they think that an unskilled job which doesn't even require a high school education should garner more per hour than several skilled trades. I don't even make $15 an hour at my "other" job which is a skilled trade and extremely physically demanding. If I could get $15 an hour to flip burgers, I would quit the hot, sweaty physical job and ask you if you want fries with that instead. That much is a no-brainer... but the question is SHOULD fast food workers get $15 an hour?
Here's the trouble with raising minimum wage, or even just paying Ronald McBurger $15 per hour.... It's what I call the "McDonalds Index".

Look at the price of the average McDonald's value meal and then compare that price with the prevailing minimum wage over the past 30 years. When minimum wage was $3.25 per hour a Big Mac value meal cost an average 0f $3.17. When minimum wage was $4.75 a Big Mac value meal cost on average, $4.68. More recently, a minimum wage of $5.50 per hour also brought price changes of fast food meals to an average of $5.52. When the minimum wage was increased to $7.25 fast food meals crept up to just under $7 and some meals are over $8 currently. Sure, these price increases are cleverly hidden in menu changes and such but the fact remains that the average fast food meal costs almost exactly the same as one hour of minimum wage earnings.

With that being said, if minimum wage increases, so does the cost of business. This cost is not organic to JUST fast food establishments, it is perpetuated throughout the entire market. The impact will be felt at Walmart, McDonalds, the grocery store, and businesses like yours. When the operating costs of a business increase, those businesses' prices also increase. What are we really gaining? Sure, folks will get a larger paycheck, but their daily bills (as well as ours) increase proportionately as well.

 

[bob]

Do you really believe that if all folks got education and skills there would be enough jobs to go around?.....And it all of a sudden more folks decided to be self employed, the amount they could get for the goods and services they sell would "plummet"....

Nonsense. There will never be enough jobs to go around, regardless of circumstances. The unemployment rate is never zero. Ever. All anyone can do is deal themselves the best hand they can. By definition, those with marketable skills can usually avail themselves of employment. Those without may not. The operative word here is 'marketable'.

Spare me the sad stories of individuals with BA's, MA's, even PhD's laboring cleaning restrooms. No matter what level of education, if an individual does not possess marketable skills, its employment opportunities are seriously diminished. Spending untold years in college laboring at Medieval English Literature studies or other silliness usually does not qualify anyone with marketable skills. Unless, perhaps, they open a Medieval English Literature shop.

Mandating an arbitrary minimum wage contributes absolutely nothing to the situation.

 

[Locals Find!]

Senseless Tirade of BS removed.

The issue at hand has absolutely nothing to do with the Federal Minimum wage. A few minutes of getting off the uneducated soap box spent googling the facts of the issue. Would have you realize that the requested wage increase is in 5-6 Major Metropolitan areas where an hours wage won't even buy a gallon of milk and a full day's pay won't even buy enough groceries to pay for food for a family of 4. Let alone, housing and other essentials. Not cars, boats, & vacation time.

We are talking about workers being able to make a living wage not an exorbitant wage.

For those claiming they don't make $15 probably live in area where the cost of living is much lower. I have lived in some of these areas where they are asking for this higher wage. I can tell you I was making close to $85,000 a year and wasn't even considered upper middle class. I was barely scratching out lower middle class.

Wages need to be relative to the cost of living for a given area. If an area is populated by mufti-milloniares then I highly doubt that an area like that is going to see a huge leap in market prices for standard items like food, basic clothes etc. as those items are already priced at the top of the market you are simply bringing wages of the lowest workers up to a standard that they can afford to keep alive and serving the individuals of those communities.

That is the issue at hand here. These companies will not voluntarily do this. Unions were actually originally born to help abuse of this nature. Sadly most of them grew too large and became as greedy as the corporations they originally fought against.

If you compare the unions of the late 1800s and early 1900s to today's modern behemoths. You will see they are world's apart.

 

[rydods]

As a small business, it's easier for me to be flexible to changes. On a small scale it's relatively easy to adjust. The problem with pushing these major corporations to an almost 67% hike, and you can already see this happening, is that it's cheaper and smarter in the long run to cut out human labor. There is nothing keeping McDonald from becoming nearly completely automated.

People=Errors, problems and headaches. I'm sure in some places $15 an hour isn't enough to pay the bills and that's why there should be more jobs in between minimum wage and CEO that people can work to because most of those 25-40 an hour fixed income jobs are gone and there is no reason for these major corporations and other larger business to create these jobs or bring them back.

Greed and Cheap or no labor whether it's here or overseas will win every time...it's an unfortunate thing.

 

[Techman]

during the katrina recovery.

Fast food joints could not get help to re-open. All the good workers were making huge bucks working for recovery companies. So they went to high pay with a huge bonus to boot.

Just as before the storm,, That left workers with weak job skills working low skill jobs. In the fast food (burger king) they got $15 bux an hour with a $500.00 bonus at the end of the month if they met certain requirements. They had to be on time and work and complete every day as scheduled.

Very few got their bonus. Workers did not show up on time, did not work entire shifts, and did not complete an entire work schedule. The facts remained that higher wages did not translate into a better qualified disciplined worker. The potential for a huge bonus did not motivate higher work ethic. And at the end of that experiment the same people at the lower end of the wage chain were still living the same bad habits as before.



On the other hand. The better skilled worker could rise up and make more. PRoof?

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Burger-King-Salaries-E7201.htm

 

[bob]

The issue at hand has absolutely nothing to do with the Federal Minimum wage. A few minutes of getting off the uneducated soap box spent googling the facts of the issue. Would have you realize that the requested wage increase is in 5-6 Major Metropolitan areas where an hours wage won't even buy a gallon of milk and a full day's pay won't even buy enough groceries to pay for food for a family of 4. Let alone, housing and other essentials. Not cars, boats, & vacation time.

We are talking about workers being able to make a living wage not an exorbitant wage.

No one is entitled to a living wage. Better yet, no one is entitled to anything whatsoever. If one's goal is to make sufficient money to support a family of four or how many, one does not accept an entry level position and then demand that the employer increase wages in order to provide for one's brood.

When someone claims they are entitled to something, anything at all, this claim, if fulfilled, constitutes a mortgage on the time and resources of others not so entitled. There are no circumstances, none whatsoever, that entitle one person to the fruits of another's labors. None, nada, zip, zero.

Every human being is responsible for its own condition. It is what it has chosen to be. Rich or poor, wage worker or executive, janitor or jet propulsion engineer. They have chosen to be whatever they are. No one else should have to be impacted by the choices of others.

...standard items like food, basic clothes etc. as those items are already priced at the top of the market you are simply bringing wages of the lFor those claiming they don't make $15 probably live in area where the cost of living is much lower. I have lived in some of these areas where they are asking for this higher wage. I can tell you I was making close to $85,000 a year and wasn't even considered upper middle class. I was barely scratching out lower middle class.

Wages need to be relative to the cost of living for a given area. If an area is populated by mufti-milloniares then I highly doubt that an area like that is going to see a huge leap in market prices forowest workers up to a standard that they can afford to keep alive and serving the individuals of those communities.

No. Wages, regardless of the region in which they might be paid, must show a positive revenue to wage differential. An employee must generate more revenue than it's paid. If this is not the case, the employer has no reason to continue the employment of that individual. Businesses are not charities, there to support the indigent. They are mechanisms for creating revenue for the proprietors. Period.

...That is the issue at hand here. These companies will not voluntarily do this. Unions were actually originally born to help abuse of this nature. Sadly most of them grew too large and became as greedy as the corporations they originally fought against...

Not quite. Early unions were far more a product of abject working conditions than income level. You are modestly correct in that of late they have become mechanisms for transferring funds from ordinary people to political parties, causes, and individual grandees. They far more serve the political apparatus than the members.

 

[MikePro]

sorry to say, but it's pretty expensive to live in New York, Chicago, L.A., etc.... which is why i chose not to even try.

...and if I did, then I definitely wouldn't be banking on McD's raising my pay 100% to support it, because I decided to sit out from like an entitled brat with a protest sign.

 

[Deaton Design]

I always put myself in the place of people who work in these minimum wage jobs. I did it myself back when it was 2.50 an hour. Although I dont think it should be raised in one quick jump
to 15.00, I do think it should be raised higher than what it is. These corporations are doing very well, paying their CEOs millions of dollars, when all the while it's the workers that are doing the
actual work. My wife worked 16 years for a discount store here, and when it moved out, she was making 6.90 an hour. She got a raise of .20 cents once a year or so. Even the managers and asst.
managers werent paid that well, but they were a large company,and are still in business, just not here. No doubt they made millions and millions of dollars for their higher ups and CEOs, but never
passed that on down to their employees. My wife was also a department head. We can all say, well, they should have gone to school, or votech school or something of the sort, but we all know
everyone cant do that, or doesnt have the means or abilities to get through it. Raise the minimum wage, and reward employees when they do well, instead of telling them to sign up for food stamps
or sell stuff on ebay. Or thats what I heard McDonalds did.

 

[neil_se]

when em I lived in oz a few years ago, I was blown away by the wages! People in call centres were making $25 an hour to start! Mind you the cost of living was much higher in oz than back home.

Indeed. I was talking with a signwriting business in remote Queensland and to compete with mining industry wages the admin staff were on $40/hr and tradespeople $60/hr+.

It's difficult to say what direct effect the minimum wage has on cost of living, as we've also got less than 1/10th the population density and diseconomies of scale with only 22 million people. As highlighted here, one drives the other as a higher cost of living also necessitates a higher minimum wage. It does make many industries uncompetitive on an international scale, eg. very little automotive manufacturing is done locally now as the cost to do so it too high against asian and european manufacturing, and with mining, oil & gas salaries averaging over $140,000/yr it costs almost as much to get the stuff out of the ground as what they can sell it for.