My nearest Subway has a “help wanted” sign on the door promising “up to” $15 per hour, but damn that’s hard work.
I see words like "up to" the same way I do words like "virtually" when they come before other words like "painless." Those adverbs are doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Yeah, show me "starting at" and I'll be more impressed. I drive an Uber in my free time, and after subtracting what I spend on gas, I net $20/hour on a mediocre weekend and close to $40/hour on a weekend where Uber is desperate for drivers and piling on lots of bonuses. (A major plus to gig economy work that doesn't get talked about a lot: if a retail business needs people to work on a certain day, they can just say "work this day or you're fired." If Uber needs people to drive on a certain day, the only thing they can do is offer more and more money until enough people finally take them up on it.) So that's $20/hour minimum for a gig where I get to set my own hours. Employers are going to have to face that $15/hour for a job that keeps you on your feet all the time, requires you to let them set your schedule, and isn't particularly rewarding in any other way just isn't competitive anymore.
You do you, I'm just gonna say I'll take $15/hour over $20/hour where I'm constantly driving and have to be in close quarters with random strangers.
All these billionaires get to the very tippy-top where nobody will ever be able to pull them down from in their lifetimes, and then they have no idea how to take their foot off the gas. It's okay. You can pay your workers more now, and hire more so the ones you have don't run themselves raw. Let them have sick days, even. Same thing with the global economy. We've won at generating basic necessities. We have all we need. We just have to distribute it to where it's needed. In the meantime we keep our foot to the gas and burn out the planet when we should be letting up right now and making sure the planet will be sustainable for future generations. The hunter/gatherer's scrabbly "fight for every bit of survival at all costs" mindset needs to go away in the first world.
I think at some point it becomes a sickness, a mania. Poor folks, for example, who grow up in poverty tend to live a feasting/fasting lifestyle because that's how they grew up. Breaking the cycle of "must save every penny at all costs" is a hard one to break, and because corporations aren't people, they never "die" so the need to keep scrimping (outside of executive pay, of course) is always present. It's why with $200 BILLION to his name, Jeff Bezos still pushes people to work themselves to death, and yeah, I've worked in catalog warehouses, and taking a piss break is frowned upon but allowed. I can imagine someone as Lex Luthorian as Jeff Bezos would see it otherwise.
It's a zero skill fucking job. You can learn all of your responsibilities in a day. If you expect family-supporting wages for that, you might as well ask for a pet unicorn while you're at it. The entire drag of working there is the fucksmear customers who feel empowered to abuse someone who cannot stand up for themselves. If you're searching for the reason why fast food jobs suck, look in the goddamn mirror.
It's not just fast food jobs though, it's the restaurant industry as a whole. Yes, any monkey can work at McDonald's, but to work on a line at say, an upscale bistro or something, you still get paid similar wages and those jobs are not zero skill jobs. You have to have skills to get those jobs. Period.
Most of those jobs are perfect targets for replacement by automated systems anyway. Fast food joints will at some point wind up with only a manager/security guard and maybe a supply-bin-changer-0uter person.
I learned all the responsibilities for my job in one day also. In fact, I’ve written job descriptions and work instructions for my job and that, in its entirety, could be read within an hour. Yet I get paid way more than if I were working at McDonald’s.
So in the mean time fuck the workers? I'm sorry, but if your wife wants to go to a nice winery or something for Sunday brunch, no robot is going to be making your food. Yes those people do get paid more, but it's not a zero skill job and frankly, they should be paid more. I'm just talking about back of the house here. The front of the house has to deal with the Real Housewives of _____ all of the time as well as Mr. I'm a steak expert, but apparently don't know the difference between MR and MW who leaves a $20 on $400 tab. No, I'm not joking, it happens all of the time. Oh and guess what, you don't get breaks, you don't get benefits, you have to work with dick heads who take twenty cigarette breaks and your boss is a dick.
Hey dipshit, being able to work with fucksmear customers is a skill. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
I'd like to see the people saying "fast food is a zero skill job" work a lunch shift at a busy McDonald's. Ten bucks says they'd come out sobbing. I personally feel McDonald's-type jobs should be transitory in nature. But these jobs are invaluable real world experience for young people and often good resume builders for older people. Like anywhere else, people should be paid according to their experience and skill level. No one should be exploited as cheap labor. Jesus, how can that even be up for debate?
The point is that those jobs are very likely to go away entirely once the technology to do it is in place. And fast food is not the only category where that's going to happen. Look for a lot of jobs to disappear as automation and AI systems take them over. The entire transportation industry, for example, as vehicles become autonomous and warehouses are run by robots. Eventually, assuming we don't Blow Ourselves Up Real Good beforehand, almost all of the current "job market" is going to go poof on us. Then what?
Apparently the human workers end up better off for it. They get a share of the company and get paid a decent wage.
Labor is just like anything else in the market: Its price is determined by a whole bunch of different factors. The amount of money that people are willing to sell their time for is influenced by a lot more than how long it took them to learn the job, including: Will they be working late nights and every single holiday, or are they going to have daytime hours and two days off in a row every week? Are they going to be on their feet all day, or sitting at a desk? Will they be working outside in all kinds of weather, or in a nice climate-controlled building? Will they be dealing with obnoxious customers all day, or are they in a back room somewhere? Are there physical hazards, or not? Are they going to be dealing with gross shit that nobody really wants to touch, or are they going to be answering phones? Fast-food work may not take all that long to learn, but it involves doing lots of shit that most people don't enjoy, and usually with crappy hours. That drives up the price. If you offer me $100 to fire up my computer and do data entry for four hours while sitting at my desk at home, I'll take it. If you offer me $100 to scrape shit off the floors of gas station bathrooms for four hours, I'm gonna say "nah, it's not worth it." You may think that data entry should be a more highly-valued skill than shit scraping, but frankly, that doesn't matter. It is, however, fun to watch all the "yay unfettered capitalism" business owners start squealing like stuck pigs when the laws of supply and demand don't give them everything they want.
Remember just a few months ago when restaurant workers were being praised for working through the pandemic? I remember. Now the masks are coming off and suddenly we're back on the pile of shit and things aren't even fully back to normal yet.
What happens then depends on the type of cultures we have fostered. If society has a "The people on the bottom deserve to starve mentality" then we get ready for the revolutions. If we've fostered a "everyone deserves a base standard of living" mindset, then we might successfully transition to that world. As for where the cash for schemes like UBI come from, I think it will have to be corporate taxes. A higher base taxation rate, with deductions allowed for spending on wages, capped at a certain level.
If this is true then I think our globe trotting days are numbered. Our military will be forced to shrink.
More of an aptitude, and one I fully admit I lack. Most of my worst job memories are in foodservice. Been there, done that and worse. Go fuck yourself. I have no patience for entitled little pisspots who turn their nose up at a paycheck. If you think hard work is beneath you, so are stability and self-reliance. Such a person wants to live life being cared for like a child. "Deserving" is a fantasy land measure applied by people who think the universe gives two shits how they feel. There are the opportunities available to you with your skill set, and whether make the effort to take full advantage of them or not.
At base it's going to be one of those things that future historians call a "transition period." If the trends work out and technology continues to advance as I think it will, we actually do get to a post-scarcity society where the cost of production of most commodities is at or near zero and you'll have the Star Trek economy where, if you're hungry or need new shoes, you just walk up to the nearest replicator and tell it what you need. But getting there is going to be ugly, especially on the front end as automation gets good enough to replace human workers but not yet good enough to provide low/no cost basic needs.
Cool, so if I offer you $10, you'll spend your next day off lying on your back in a bus station with a sign inviting people to spit in your mouth? I mean, you hate entitled people who turn up their nose at a paycheck, after all.
