If you need a job to feed your kids and a job at McDonald's is the only one you can get, you'll take it, and gladly...even though it doesn't pay enough to reliably feed, shelter, and clothe a young mother and her child(ren). Maybe she has those kids because she was irresponsible, like some on here would claim. But maybe she has those kids because her marriage dissolved and her husband skipped town. Or maybe her husband died and had no insurance. Or maybe her husband can't (or won't) work anymore.
Obviously you aren't taking the job "gladly" if you plan to bitch and moan that you need your pay doubled. Sorry, the world doesn't work this way. Just because a family needs a "living" wage doesn't mean that every job needs to provide a living wage. Jobs that require no skill at all will not pay a living wage.
Go to a fast-food restaurant sometime and TALK to the older workers and ask them why they're working there. Sure, some of them are there because they made unwise decisions...but all too often they're there because something tragic happened, and they have no other choice.
There is no doubt that if you are over the age of 20 and working at McDonald's something went wrong, but that isn't the point. The point is the job you are doing is unskilled and anybody on the street can do it.
Shades of gray. Not black and white - shades of gray.
Nope. Unskilled labor, not life stories - Unskilled labor.
Another thing to think about, guy -
for every job opening, there's 3.07 Americans wanting that job. When you open up the paper and see all those help-wanted ads, there's many, many people - grown adults with children - who don't have the skills those jobs require. A couple years ago, McDonald's offered 60,000 or so jobs, and wound up turning away nearly a million applicants, many even with college degrees. But to listen to y'all, well, it was these peoples' fault somehow, and how dare we talk about raising the minimum wage!
Which is why the pay is what it is. The problem here is that McDonald's is doing all of this hiring and YOU want to bitch about it. What if McDonald's paid double the minimum wage but hired only 30,000 instead of 60,000... and upped their job requirements to requiring a high school diploma. Is this a victory for the same unskilled uneducated single mom who now doesn't even have a job?
All of the above goes to show one thing - it's silly, stupid to think that a fast-food job should only pay chump change. And more than anything else, here's the key: if the job doesn't pay enough for a breadwinner to feed the family, that family WILL go on the government dole. So that's your choice: you can either require the employer pay a living wage (and pay an extra dollar or so per Happy Meal), OR you, the taxpayer, can effectively SUBSIDIZE that employer by paying for the food stamps the person needs to feed his or her family...OR you can still pay crappy minimum wages and have no social safety net and the families have to hit the streets and bring up the crime rate and bring down the property values, which means you wind up paying ANYWAY in terms of more crime and less tax revenue for things like schools and roads.
A whole load of false dichotomies in that paragraph. If the employer is required to double it's payroll they won't pass all that on to the customer, they will cut staff, they will further automate the process, because any sane person understands that you don't get 17% more revenue by charging 17% more. People will shop there less, and as is the history of the bleeding hearts, I'd assume that 99.999% of all people who claim they will shop at McDonald's more if they pay a "living wage" won't actually do that, and many people who do go to McDonald's will likely go less often if they have to pay more for it.
But then I don't think the average wage warrior really actually gives a good god damn about the actual employees at the local McDonald's and what actually happens to their jobs if McDonald's is forced to double their pay... it's always going to be the imaginary person in their head that they fought for, and that person will always benefit from their efforts.
I bought a sandwich as WaWa the other day and realized that we are only half a step away from eliminating most fast food jobs already. You can eliminate the cashier position over night by simply turning register around and letting the customer push the buttons.
Any way you look at it, you pay. So...your choice: require a living wage, OR pay for more food stamps and other government assistance, OR pay for more jails and police and deal with even crappier schools and roads.
What's your choice?
You've created a false dichotomy. Do I pay a lower amount for a happy meal, and have 60,000 people on partial assistance, or do I pay $1 more and pay for the 30,000 who are now completely without pay because their jobs were cut?
You can't put welfare on a resume, so I opt for McDonald's hiring as many workers as they can at the wage they budget for because work is ALWAYS superior to welfare.
Back when I was graduating high school and was faced with the task of paying my way through college I realized early on that you get paid crap at a fast food restaurant because 1) the job was easy and 2) It required no skills. Since I was young and had no real skill I went looking for the hard jobs that were also unskilled. Most of them involved shovels. I quickly learned that the worse the stuff you were asked to shovel the better the pay. So it came to be that I made far more than double minimum wage for literally shoveling crap.
