My first job was at McDonald's. I was 15 and begged them to higher me. I was living on my own, going to school, and just trying to make extra money to support myself.
The manger tried, but couldn't higher me at 15, this was in 1991. When I turn 16 she used my year book photo to prove I was old enough to higher,
I made minimum wage. I worked my *advertiser censored* off.
I am now 38. If my son wanted a job, I would expect nothing less of him.
During my HS years I closed, worked hard hours and paid my dues. I was only paid minimum wage for 45 days upon hiring. Then I got 2 raises because I had proven myself.
Why do so many young people today seem to expect respect, instead of proving they are worthy of respect?
Things have changed. In 1992, people got raises when they worked hard because the economy was better.
People no longer get raises for working their tails off. Now, instead of being rewarded for hard work, people feel like they are being punished. They get benefits reduced, hours reduced, furlough days (unpaid days), and laid off. When hired at new jobs, they are hired at much lower rates of pay and often must do 2.5 times the work for less.
No, they are not. That is entitlement. You are owed what you agree to work for. If you want more money then be worth more to the company. Simple as that. Who decides what a "fair" wage is? The business gets to decide that. They are the ones running the business and figuring the expenses and what an employee's job is worth to the company. If you want someone to mow your lawn don't you pay based on how much the job is worth to you? Or do you pay based on how many kids or pets or whatever, they are trying to support? If no one wants to do it for the price you are willing to pay then you have to decide if you are willing to pay more, do it yourself, or not have it done. Why is a business responsible for making sure you make enough to feed your children? Don't have them until you are not making minimum wage anymore.
Sometimes strikers determine what fair pay is. Sometimes their efforts pay off. I keep hearing this argument that if you don't like the pay, don't work there. But many people have zero choice. See my comment above. They are let go from a former, better paying job and then are reduced to lower paying jobs that go nowhere.
What many people feel is the problem (and why they feel "entitled" to more), is that the corporate big wigs (and I'm not talking about small business owners), pretty much never take a hit.
I remember the large-scale California supermarket strikes in 03'-04'. During that time, the stores fought the unions hard saying they would fold if they gave into the worker's demands not to dramatically cut benefits (health/pension). The year of the strike, my friend's mom, who was in charge of the deli departments of Albertson's in her region, earned a $20,000.00 bonus. She took her two sons and their girlfriends on an all expenses paid trip to Oahu with some of the bonus. Okay? That was the same year the stores were screaming about how they simply didn't have the funds to continue the benefits for the lower scale workers.
That's the thing. The people who allow these companies to succeed, the bread and butter workers, always get the shaft, while corporate sits pretty. I think the blue collar workers are essentially asking, in many of these cases, that everyone across the board takes a hit when the economy sours, but pretty much universally, it is only the "underlings" who have to shoulder the weight of the economic decline.
Let's look at what CEOs, for example, in the fast food industry have been earning:
NEW YORK — McDonald's Corp. more than tripled the pay packages last year for its new CEO Don Thompson and the man he replaced, Jim Skinner.
The pay increases came at a challenging time for the world's biggest hamburger chain. McDonald's is facing intensifying competition, a trend toward healthier eating and weak economic conditions in many countries where it operates.
McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Ill., gave Thompson a package worth $13.8 million, up from the $4.1 million he received in 2011, according to a regulatory filing made Friday.
Skinner's pay meanwhile rose to $27.7 million from $8.8 million the year before, reflecting a $10.2 million payment as part of his retirement under his contract agreement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/mcdonalds-ceo-pay_n_3070833.html
NEW YORK (AP) — Burger King CEO Bernardo Hees got a big pay hike last year as the world's second-largest hamburger chain revamped its menu and began trading publicly again.
The Miami-based fast-food chain gave Hees a pay package worth $6.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's up 61 percent from the $4 million he received in 2011.
The compensation for the 43-year-old Hees included a base salary of $750,000, which was unchanged from the previous year. His option awards rose to $4.2 million, from $1.2 million, in part because he used a "bonus swap" program that allowed him to use some of his bonus pay to buy shares and get matching shares from the company.
Since taking over Burger King, 3G has applied its aggressive cost-cutting strategy that included slashing jobs at its headquarters and shifting to an entirely franchised model.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/burger-king-gives-ceo-pay-hike-amid-revitalization
And it's not just CEO's. It's also all shareholders:
Pay Disparity
The
pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executive officers is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York.
Older workers like Johnson are staffing fast-food grills and fryers more often, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. In 2010, 16- to 19-year-olds made up 17 percent of food preparation and serving workers, down from almost a quarter in 2000, as older, underemployed Americans took those jobs.
“The sheer number of adults in the industry has just exploded” because fast-food restaurants “not only survived, but thrived during the economic recession,” said Saru Jayaraman, director of the Food Labor Research Center at the
University of California at Berkeley.
The recovery from the last downturn has been the most uneven in recent history. The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to census estimates. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 97 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those who made less than $101,583.
The widening chasm is most pronounced in the restaurant and retail businesses. The total number of people employed in the U.S. at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and McDonald’s and Yum Brands restaurants exceeds the entire 2.7 million population of Chicago. Net income at those three companies has jumped by at least 22 percent from four years ago.
Shareholders Benefit
Shareholders, not employees, have reaped the rewards. McDonald’s, for example, spent $6 billion on share repurchases and dividends last year, the equivalent of $14,286 per restaurant worker employed by the company. At the same time, restaurant companies have formed an industrywide effort to freeze the
minimum wage, whose purchasing power is 20 percent less than in 1968, according to the
Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that advocates for low- and middle-income workers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/mcdonald-s-8-25-man-and-8-75-million-ceo-shows-pay-gap.html
So instead of helping to shoulder some of the weight of the economic downturn, the execs and shareholders have shifted the weight of the recession solely to the backs of the workers and as a result, while the workers struggle to eat and see freezes in minimum wage, etc., the rich have been benefiting, the corporations have been benefiting and actually getting richer and increasing profits, while the country struggles.
It's actually quite insane, really. I get the argument about what choices led a 35 year old to be working fast food but apparently the answer for many is not that they are just lazy, ignorant slobs who made poor choices, but instead lost jobs due to economic downturn and now have really no other choice but to grab what they can get.
But while they scrape and scramble to survive working two and three minimum wage jobs, they are becoming impatient watching the harsh efforts to slash employee benefits and wages, or to freeze wages at a place that doesn't come close to matching the current cost of living, result not in a stabilization of profits for these companies, but in actual increases in profits to these major corporations. It's like the corporations are profiting from the lack of choice and the economic struggles of the working class and middle class turned working poor.
I think that's the issue here. It makes a lot of sense to me.