response 51 of 199:

Mar 25 15:42 UTC 2002

The problem with the wages paid by places like McDonalds is that, long-term,
it's less than someone can afford to live on.  They use workers until they
get sick or otherwise disabled, then dump them on the welfare system and
hire more.  We all end up paying, as a result.

response 53 of 199:

Mar 25 17:02 UTC 2002

A very significant portion of McDonald's (and other fast food) 
employees are not dependent upon that income as a primary source of 
their income. McDonalds has deliberately implemented policies and 
training practices so that ANYONE can do the job. They use technology 
in such a way that a new person working there can be trained very 
quickly to do the job. They also tend to be very flexible with their 
scheduling so they can attract a certain part of the labor market which 
generally includes teenagers, secondary earners and even retirees. All 
of whom usually have insurance and dont need to live off the money they 
earn. Now, it is true that increasingly more people are trying to live 
off the wages offered by McDonalds and also the people McDonalds are 
traditionally trying to hire are either choosing not to work at all 
(teenagers) or choosing different jobs. I think this is why McDonalds 
in most areas is currently paying a wage higher than minimum wage. 
Still, I have never met anyone except for some very mentally ill people 
who were in community mental health sponsored work programs who worked 
in fast food for any length of time as hourly workers. I think 
most "career" fast food types at least eventually get salaried 
positions with what most folks would consider a living wage for a 
single person (which is far less than I would want to live on).

I dont think it is fair to blame McDonald's for using up workers and 
then dumping them on a social welfare system when they become sick or 
disabled. Mcdonald's sole purpose is to make a profit. It is our 
government and our society as a whole who is failing workers. If 
uninsured workers is a concern (and I do agree that it is worth being 
concerned about), another solution has to be found. We all end up 
paying for societal problems one way or another anyway. If we really 
have an issue with poverty and poor people there are a lot of things we 
can do to help people that would be more effective than a minimum wage 
increase. 

How about free college tuition in public universities and community 
colleges for everyone? How about free vocational training to everyone? 
Give the poor people the skills they need to get better jobs. If there 
is a shortage of unskilled labor as a result, so be it. Those wages 
will have to increase and/or firms will have to increase capital 
spending. This is not a bad thing at all although it might mean that 
consumer goods get a little more expensive so we

response 55 of 199:

Mar 25 18:28 UTC 2002

Ah, so the problem is the lack of enforcement of immigration laws?

response 57 of 199:

Mar 25 19:43 UTC 2002

Re #55: That's part of it, though now that the economy is no longer 
growing the pressure on the labor market has pretty much gone away.

response 59 of 199:

Mar 25 20:32 UTC 2002

re #57 - Right, which means there is no compelling reason to raise the 
salaries of those in the military. :)

response 61 of 199:

Mar 25 22:05 UTC 2002

there's a book called fast food nation .. or something close. it discusses
how the fast food industry plays a huge part in destroying society.

i really wouldn't mind living in a place where, at 18 i'd have to do a year
of military service of some sort, and then go on to get a college education
for practically nothing. my german friends seem very well balanced and
intelligent.

raven, i'm right there with ya. the article you pasted by him seems to be
based on actual facts and not opinion. i think it's just too hard for some
people to be able to admit that this country has been been involved in these
kinds of atrocities for a long time.

response 63 of 199:

Mar 25 23:00 UTC 2002

re: "#45 of 62: by Radical Traditions (raven) on Mon, Mar 25, 2002 (02:24):
 re #39 Sweden seems to do fine without wage slavery, and is a leading
producer  of cars and cell phones among other things.  Now I NOT saying we
should  adopt democratic socialism like Sweden but I think it does show that
there   is emperical (sic) evidence that your theory is full of holes."

Didn't you hear the news tha Nokia may move its manufacturing out 
of Sweden because of high labor costs.  The Swedes are frightened.

re:  "How about free college tuition in public universities and community 
colleges for everyone?"

Yeah, right, this worked great in CA, didn't it?

response 65 of 199:

Mar 26 00:06 UTC 2002

Good for them.

response 67 of 199:

Mar 26 03:16 UTC 2002

Re #51:  You mean, McDonald's hires people who work half-time or
so, and then has to train replacements when they move on to better
things.  (I think my reading is a lot less prejudicial than yours.)

Re #63, #64:  The time of professors and such is a scarce resource.
There is no reason not to put course materials on-line for anyone
to use, but trying to create enough course slots for everyone means
you either get really selective about academic qualifications or
you have to hire the less-qualified to teach and debase the system.
(Then you wonder why the public isn't get its money's worth.)

I can think of reasons why Sweden might have fewer issues with an
economic underclass than the USA does, and which have nothing to
do with the minimum wage.

1.)     Sweden is a much more homogeneous society than the USA.
2.)     Sweden probably has a much higher literacy rate.  (I
        intend to check this when I have the chance.)

#1 is an accident of history, and #2 is settled long before
people are of the age to work at McDonald's; you are not going
to fix the problems created by lousy parents or schools where
gangs rule the hallways by increasing the price of burgers.

(#2 might be a consequence of #1, as "everyone learns to read" could
be part of the social ethos.  You will not have this where "diversity"
is such a panacea that it is more important than education, as it
appears to be among the political left.  Certain types of "cultural
diversity" are destructive; failure to recognize this is lunacy.)

response 69 of 199:

Mar 26 03:30 UTC 2002

Heh.  I love people who make profit-based corporations out to be some sort
of Evil Empire with clear malice toward genuine people.  

Most of the people whom I've seen work at McDonald's are not attempting to
use it as a source of long-term support.  The hypothetical anecdote of the
company using up the labor until they go on disability or burn out is absurd.
It's just easy to harp at Mcdonald's because they make money.

Frankly, I waffle between apathy and contempt for people who whine endlessly
about small, meaningless elements that they consider to be major causes of
worldly problems and propose irrelevant softball solutions to them so they
can feel good about themselves and find someone to blame when their futile
suggestions are not followed.  I appear to be in the "contempt" stage, but
don't think that has anything to do with the actual arguments involved here.
It's the kind of day I'm having. :)

Really, though, the problems raven mentions in his attacks against the
convenient images he dislikes seeing make money are a whole lot more
complicated than something raised wages will solve.  I should bone up on my
history of the American incursion into Somalia, because that keeps coming up
as a splendid example of why even the easiest-sounding solutions to large
problems are a whole lot more complicated than that.

response 71 of 199:

Mar 26 15:44 UTC 2002

Considering that those in the service dont have to pay federal income 
taxes, I wonder how their take home pay compares with similar private 
sector jobs. 

response 73 of 199:

Mar 26 18:29 UTC 2002

Re #71:
    They don't???

Re #39 result 2:

    I think labor damn well *ought* to be replaced with machinery. This is
in fact the *only* way to get an economy that gives people more for less
effort. And the jobs that should be automated first are those that people
want the least: fruit picking, hamburger flipping, waitron, cashier, etc.
U-scans are a great idea, at least in principal.

    I didn't work at McDonalds specifically, but I did work in a restaurant
once - making pizzas. Eventually I managed to have a couple of jobs as a
Designer. Of the two, I would prefer a Designer job *even if they both paid
the same*. In fact, I'd take reduced pay to have that job instead of pizza
duty. And in the pizza place, the waitrons didn't seem to have it much
easier. (Of course, my preferences *could* be atypical. I had a poll item on
both BBSes on this, but that seems to have been pre-empted by the Sept 11
attacks.)

    As for skills: it was not necessary to have a college education in
order to do my Designer jobs. You needed to know how to operate the CAD
software. But that is easily taught, a lot of the procedures specific to
the company had automated scripts for them, and there was full documentation
for all commands. I entered my last job with *zero* knowledge of its
specific software and did well enough to stay there for years. (For that
matter, I've heard of somebody on the night shift at one place getting in
trouble for letting his 7 year old kid draw virtual pictures on a CAD
workstation.) The "better skills" that are needed for most jobs are
available. It takes some effort to acquire a lot of them, but it doesn't
have to be particularly difficult or expensive.


    The real problem, I've come to realize, is that *somebody* has to flip
the burgers! The job competition is mostly a contest to get out of burger
flipping duty. (BDH, in fact, pointed this out to me a few years back in my
item on The Economy. Everybody wants to be an engineer or a lawyer or a
programmer instead of a burger flipper.) And no matter how you juggle the
pay rates, or how much "education" you manage to give everybody, the pay for
the majority of workers in terms of hamburgers per hour, clean-toilet-months
per hour, apartment-rent-hours per hour, miles worth of transportation
expenses per hour, and so on, is going to be dismally low, and earnable by
most people only through these low skilled jobs because all the engineer
slots are filled.

    The only way out of this is to reduce the number of man-hours needed to
get a given amount of cooking, cleaning, fruit picking, and assembling
done. This means automated machinery. As many incentives to this end as
possible should be provided. (One of these in fact can, and should, be a
reduction of the number of hours required of most everybody as a condition
of having their jobs.)