Comments
Please wait...
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
is a proud member of the
network
network
All contents © Noisy Creek, Inc.
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Gen…
Several? Not even a baker's dozen?
But she spoke Spanish!
Who eats this shit anyway?
Oh that's right, po' people.
Fat City is an excelent establisment if you need to service your German automobile.
But hey don't worry Barack Hussein Obama will bail you out...as long as you are a bank.
The unpaid intern reporting on wages....
If we suddenly decide as a city that the highest minimum wage in the nation isn't high enough, who pays for it? maybe the city should start writing checks like we do for housing. Maybe they could create union jobs to do meaningless work like we do with recycling.
When doing the least possible in the working world is suddenly elevated to a living wage, what sort of inflation do you think that would cause with say, food, gas and housing?
Who is with me!?!?
I'm also pretty sure a 'general' strike would involve more than one sector of one industry. And also anyone who smashed a corporate window would get tearful hugs of gratitude from exactly 72 authentic blue-collar workers.
Gas, housing, and food shouldn't be as cheap as it is, and we should all be making 4-6x as much as we do.
We've been left behind by the top 5% wage earners in the world.
The problem is gas, food, and housing has spent the decade correcting itself, while the wages have stayed stagnant. The lowest wage earners are feeling the pinch first. But, already many of us are feeling the pinch.
McDonald's' CEO is just got $13.8m this year. $950k of which is base salary.
For comparison's sake, the 50% wage in Seattle is a piddling $47k. 1/20th of a CEO's base wage. Probably with no bonus, thus making it 1/300th the package of the McD's CEO.
1/300th.
And, the average McD's worker is probably making only 1/900th of the CEO.
Think about that. They'd have to work 900 years to earn the money of one CEO.
This strike, along with the Occupy movement, is a sign of the times. Things are bad out here and they're getting worse.
I normally love your reporting, but asking for a statement and a name would not be out of line.
10 reasons why so many people are moving to Texas
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22649…
Bottom line, if you have someone do work, pay them a fair wage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/busine…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/busine…
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/201…
I'm sure most of the paid Stranger staffers would be happy to join the picket lines in solidarity if the interns went on strike.
But the interns will not strike.
There's an Occupy movement?
"you need to pay workers adequate wages so they can buy stuff"
The $2.99 burger special is well within reach.
Yes @23!!
Have fun in the red states with all the fundies and people like you who hate poor people.
Seriously, leave. I'll pay for your one way bus fare.
98% of the marchers were activists, not workers. Only 'several' workers joined. Learn to read.
Especially the lower classes who enjoy eating this shit.
Internships, I can't believe I have to explain this, are based on the belief that the experience you gain by volunteering your labor will allow you to get a leg up on the labor market when you enter into that rat race. If we start calling indentured servitude like my grandfather was pushed into as a child during the depression, an internship, then yes, we have a problem.
Will the Revolution be televised and, if so, will it interrupt American Idol?
I'm not saying internships need to be paid 100 bucks an hour, my first internship was a crappy wage, and lead to a better internship which lead to a better one which lead to a good job. But I was able to live at home during the first internship, and some people don't have this ability so get screwed out of the same opportunities I did.
So The Stranger is ok with paying people more to stay in crappy jobs, and ok to advocate for government to help people get better jobs and make education cheaper (all things I personally agree with), but when it comes to do their part of helping with the problem, not using unpaid labour, they're dead silent on it.
I'm not saying internships need to be paid 100 bucks an hour, my first internship was a crappy wage, and lead to a better internship which lead to a better one which lead to a good job. But I was able to live at home during the first internship, and some people don't have this ability so get screwed out of the same opportunities I did.
So The Stranger is ok with paying people more to stay in crappy jobs, and ok to advocate for government to help people get better jobs and make education cheaper (all things I personally agree with), but when it comes to do their part of helping with the problem, not using unpaid labour, they're dead silent on it.
This is why they can rail against "low" salaries and pay some of their employees absolutely nothing.
This is why they can rail against misogyny and male privilege, but have banner ad after banner ad with strippers bending over with the tagline: "it's all about you."
They are only too happy to come down in the threads to argue with the most obvious and stupid of trolls, but when someone brings this up (as often happens), they are completely silent.
But this one really bugs me because me and my friends all have great jobs, but a lot of that is because we got paid internships and where able to get the experience we needed for those jobs. If I had to take an unpaid internship I'd never be able to move to Seattle for it, as I would have to depend on my parents for support (My first crappy internship which paid only a bit more then minimum wage, wasn't nearly enough money to pay for school so I still worked my other min wage job pouring coffee, working about 60 hours a week. Even still I was lucky enough this was in my home town and I had supportive family so I was able to live at home and save the money for tution). The same people that The Stranger are fighting for here are the same people that are getting screwed by unpaid internships. They don't have the luxury of taking 4 months of unpaid work. It's weird how much the Stranger hates and rallies against white middle/upper class privilege, but they can't see it when it's staring them in the face.
Every single argument the Stranger is making about paying people more money can be made for not having paid internships.
"Every single argument the Stranger is making about paying people more money can be made for having paid internships."
I'm glad to see this, and I'm even glad to see so many people bitching about it too, because at least we're having the conversation now.
What does the McDonald's CEO do to deserve that $13.8 million this year? Does he have multiple brains, extra limbs, and the magical ability to be in many places at once? Is the continued success of the business absolutely and inexorably dependent on him in any way, shape or form? Why should his front-line employees struggle to meet their most basic needs? It's all an illusion. They could pay every single damn fry cook a living wage, keep the prices low, and the CEO could still make more than 99% of his employees. But they choose not to. If you think they have no choice but to do business this way, then you've bought in to their lie.
Furthermore, there's far less skilled labor jobs that don't require extremely expensive college degrees, which I don't think is necessary for a large chunk of the population--and in fact dilutes the experience of others with higher academic potential/aspiration. Yet, skilled labor is different than white collar jobs. Unless we're saying those skilled labor jobs will no longer exist, in which case the unskilled jobs need to pay more. Or you can count on more social unrest in the future as people start to realize the social contract is bunk.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57…
Three million open jobs in U.S., but who's qualified?
http://business.time.com/2012/06/04/the-…
This is the common refrain of employers: "I'd love to hire all these people, but I can't find people with the skills." Which is really an excuse to import more foreign workers at lower wages (e.g. I mean "immigration reform").
Well, maybe you could invest in training (as the guy in the article actually does, but makes great efforts at distributing the cost, lol) like in previous eras with massive increases in productivity--but no, usually the onus is now on the worker, which is bullshit, especially with so many unskilled or entry-level workers. Or, perhaps, one could put the government on the dole for the training?
That CEO doesn't "deserve" $13.8m a year, she "earns" $13.8m a year. The shareholders of McD are happy to pay him that as long as she generates enough value to the company. There's a very competitive market for top business talent and people who deliver extraordinary value earn extraordinary compensation.
Just like the minimum wage employee (MWE from here on out, everyone gets an acronym!) doesn't "deserve" $9/hr, he "earns" $9/hr by delivering that much in value to the company he works for.
A $9/hr minimum wage also means that if you're in business and wanting to make money, you can't hire anyone who can't deliver at least $9/hr in value. If you raise the minimum wage to $15/hr, companies won't be able to hire anyone who doesn't deliver $15/hr in value.
This is one of those classic examples of well-meaning liberals thinking they can "solve" an issue but not understanding the inevitable "trade off" consequences.
Back to the CEO vs. the MWE. In @ 12 the misanthrope says, "things are getting bad out here and they're getting worse."
How are things bad? Are things bad because some people make much less than some others? Or are things absolutely bad, and if so, by what standard? Do people live worse off than they did in the previous generation? By what measurement?
And again, I've consistently been an advocate for all workers' rights to organize and engage in collective bargaining, including MWEs, but there are certain economic realities, and they are real as physics. You can adjust laws to require employers to pay more to employees, but there will be trade-offs, and one of those trade-offs will be that people who are barely employable at $9/hr may not be able to find work when they must generate $15/hr in value in order to be employed.
No one "earns" millions of dollars - they're granted their huge salaries and benefits by a "compensation committee" composed of a relative handful of other millionaires just like themselves.
Shareholders are NOT HAPPY to pay CEOs their outrageous salaries. I own stock in individual publicly-traded companies and through mutual funds, but have NEVER been consulted on CEO compensation.
There's not a fixed sized economy pie that we're dividing up. Income isn't "distributed," it's earned. as the pie grows (with population, resource development, new technologies, etc...) there's more and more wealth being generated.
And you know what? When you're looking at income averages, you're always going to have a bottom number of $0 or very near to $0, because some people can't or won't work. (I'm not making a moral judgement here, just stating fact.) As the economy grows, and as opportunities to generate wealth increase, we're adding new levels of wealth to the pyramid. But that bottom number will always be $0 or near to $0.
It's true, compensation has been driven by short-term shareholder gains recently, but there are signs that long-term investors are regaining control of some firms and deferring compensation over longer periods of time.
And, you know what? Americans by and large are living longer, healthier, more fulfilling lives than ever before. We have had a rough patch here, and many people over-consumed in the boom years preceding it, creating a bubble that collapsed and left some innocent folks in the way of financial hurt.
Look, I'm not saying we have a perfect world. I'm saying that if you go fussing around willy nilly with a couple of levers, you may end up screwing up things for some of the people you're trying to help, people that are relatively well off now.
@55 Thanks for playing. You can either have an open mind and find sources that might not totally confirm your bias or you can just post links--with anecdotal stories and quotes from the industry lobbying to import foreign workers.
But we need to trick those in the bottom into believing they can win the lottery to become mega-rich, usually by working hard. This doesn't happen for most of the population but that carrot is very important to waive in front of people. Also, Faith In Progress, the American Dream, and the forming of the expectation that things will always get better are other important myths used across the political and economic spectrum for various ends.
Many people overconsumed, yes, but the largest leverage by 3-4 orders of magnitude was in the financial industry. Don't buy the nonsense that home mortgages by black people caused our current "bump"/protracted depression (a classic tactic to divide the population, btw) . They leveraged their houses at a few times their income? Well, look to the institutions who leveraged their bets on those loans by several hundred to a thousand. And then the government who reconstituted them (bailed them out) by buying junk assets. Homeowners didn't get that great deal.
I'm not saying the McDonald's exec didn't work hard, I'm saying he was fortunate and that his compensation is unequal on all accounts.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/10…
Labor shortages create wage increases, as there are fewer skilled laborers, so those who posses needed skills can command higher wages. This is why there are hundreds of people in their 30s making $250k+ for writing code wandering around aimlessly on Capitol HIll. It's why the restaurants there and in other parts of Seattle are so good now.
What I'm talking about is this: Increasing the minimum wage will mean that you have to pay X% more for a single unit of labor than before.
At a certain threshold, you just can't afford to bear that increase by passing it along in terms of price to your customers. (This is the aforementioned "nobody's gonna pay $10 for a taco" phenomenon mentioned @30.)
So, depending on threshold of cost you can't pass on to your customer, you either find a way to cut your workforce costs though automation or benefits cuts, or whatever, which probably means that *some* of your workers probably lose their jobs, or you go out of business, in which case *all* of your workers lose their jobs.
Maybe you even make entire industries unsustainable (read, unprofitable) and so "all workers of a certain type* lose their jobs.
This creates a labor surplus, which would, under different circumstances, drive wages down. Except you've just increased the minimum wage to $15, let's say, so no one can work for less than that, which means you've just created many (millions?) people who are forever totally unemployable. Unless you spend PILES of money to re-educate them so they can earn $15/hr.
But wait! Your tax revenues are down, because you've got millions fewer workers paying taxes, and spending money, and so on and so on and so on and so on and so on...
Trade-offs.
Also, you're making up your numbers. " The bottom 90% is even or declining since the 70s, adjusted for inflation." That number is bullshit.
Go get yourself some good per capita numbers, or median individual income numbers (some of them will even be kind enough to throw out the zeros for you) and then you'll see that all levels of income have increased since 1948, with, as we should expect, accelerating increases as you get closer to the top.
One day, you'll figure out that when you talk about these categories (top 10%, bottom 50%, whatever) you're not even talking about people. You're talking about income statistics from a certain year. People more through these categories quite a lot during their lives. But that's the next level economics lesson.
1. Income is not distributed; income is earned.
2. Before income can be earned, in cases in which labor is involved, employers and workers (or other representation of capital and labor) must come to an agreement over labor cost, or wages.
3. Periodically, employers and workers can revisit their agreement over wages, usually when income has increased because of a worker's specific skills or other contributions, but also sometimes when revenues are no longer sufficient to fulfill the currently negotiated wages. Then income is earned under the new agreement.
Skills Gap: Jobs open, no workers
http://www.11alive.com/news/article/2946…
But we'd all rather talk about raising wages instead, I guess.
Which is a bit strange, given that the activists haven't told us exactly what wage we're arguing about-- what does "living wage" mean in dollar terms here? Do we want to bring fast-food workers up to wage parity with the line cooks in your favorite locally-owned restaurants? That would get them around $12.50 an hour and no benefits at all (even at full-time). Good enough?
If we're thinking more like $15.00 plus two weeks paid vacation, a bus pass or parking spot, a 5% employer-matched 401k, dental, vision, and maybe a gym membership, well, are we going to demand that for workers in locally-owned small businesses, too? Or do national franchises have to play by tougher rules?
What is a "living wage," in terms an employer could actually be directed to implement?
And it's important to understand that this standard of living will be in direct competition with the standard of living all people are entitled to by virtue of being alive.
Minimum wage in WA is COLA adjusted according to the CPI-WA index. (It goes up each year in direct relationship to cost of living.)
Of course CPI-WA growth has been very low, so maybe a little bump to account for that and then leave it on the COLA track again for a while.
You'd never know today.
The way some of you rationalize why certain people "deserve" a low quality of life is very sad.
You have all swallowed the notion that your work is specialized and you're so great and worth your salary, and that these useless pieces of garbage don't deserve to buy food and have healthcare because anyone can do their work. They are still working hard and anytime you want a quick meal, you do depend on them. Same with agricultural workers and servers. What the hell would we do if there weren't poor people to make sure the nuts and bolts of our lives get handled?
Stop acting like you're better than people working in fast food. There are very few jobs that cannot be learned by someone of average intelligence, if they're given a real opportunity. Your skill set is probably not as unique and special as you think it is, and there are probably people who would do it for less than you are. Anyone will do anything for something if they have nothing, and a lot of people have nothing.
Though I find it ironic that The Stranger is championing working class wage increases and Unions particularly when they don't even pay their entry-level workers a SINGLE DIME (their interns) and hell would freeze over before Keck would ever allow his Stranger Slaver Monkeys to organize a union.
Wages have been stagnant for decades and cost of living as a share of earnings- particularly healthcare - has gone up steadily for decades.
As a result upward mobility has nearly ground to a halt for almost half of American society. And downward mobility has started to increase for a growing segment of society.
The CDC is projecting that due to increasing poverty, obesity, infant mortality rates and lack of affordable healthcare the US may soon be the first industrial nation to have contracting life span. This could happen in our lifetimes. Nearly every metric we have that predicts the health and sustainability of a society is trending DOWN.
These are indisputable facts. I'm doing your homework. Get off of Fox news and look this shit up. We can argue if a base level wage will sufficiently reverse all these terrible trends. But what is arguable is that these trends are real and our current system is exacerbating all these problems.
If you are arguing that Americans have it materially better than Zimbaweians, Vietnamese or Cambodians or something. Well. Golly. Hallelujah. The wealthiest country in the world has more stuff than the developing world!
BTW. In Cambodia and Vietnam they have universal heath care.
Not only that but unless you are mid to high six-figures you are still a cancer diagnosis away from abject poverty.
Most years I'm low six figures. And guess what? I still ened up in debt to the health crisis of a family member. And I have what passes for great health insurance. And it still cost me nearly a MILLION fucking dollars to get treatment for somebody I love. And that is because the cost of care is driven up by our societies tolerance of poverty.
We wont allow the working class - or the rest of society for that matter - any kind of functioning safety net like universal healthcare.
We are then forced to work with in the imperfect restrictions of the labor marketplace and demand a pitance in livable income to make up for that fact. A GOD DAMNED PITANCE.
Being against livable wages is cutting off your nose to spite your face. We all end up paying more in the long run.
What for? Just so we can feel so fucking superior to the immigrant behind the counter and SubWay? How fucked up is that.
But I fail to see how that means they shouldn't be paid a living wage. If a person is working in fast food, that means it's their only option at the time. And depending on their living situation, it may only ever be their only option. We should stand up for workers to have a modicum of security in a society as rich as ours.
Having good grades and honing a skill set for years shouldn't be a requirement for stable living.
Bonus, my interviewing skills were VERY good after the first paid internship, and legendary after the *5* interviews I did for the well-paid grad-school one. In fact, about a year after I started the first real job, I was happy houring with one of the people who hired me, and he drunkenly confessed that I was the *last* person they called for an interview based on my "paper," and *FIRST* selection for hire after the interview.
Correlation, causation, you know what they say...plus the bonus of learning lots of skills. Unpaid, low-paid, well-paid, I learned A LOT in each of these positions. I just busted hump to make the unpaid and low-paid ones work. You're only young and able to stomach 80+ hour weeks (interning 40 and working 40+) and crappy living conditions for a few months at a time (really, those 7 months were tough, but didn't kill me) once.
Well, we obviously have more valuable skill sets.
Having been in a Vietnamese hospital, can I suggest next time you're sick you go give one a spin?
I don't see any of these folks dying or starving despite all the hysterics on Slog claiming so. So they don't get to vacation on Kauai every winter and apparently continue to be quite 'liveable'.
Anyway, it's Friday. Sun is out. The strike by "several" fast food workers had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane. No one will pay burger flippers more than they are worth to the product they can produce.
It's nice for you that the system worked for you, and that is why you continue to accept and tacitly support it. I'm betting that, even though you were poor, you had some support systems in place. Parents who cared, teachers who encouraged you, some expectation of safety and a real home, and general recognition as a person who existed in your society. What if you didn't have that?
No, a walkout by a few people isn't going to change it. But a walkout by thousands of workers who insisted a higher standard would. How do you think labor laws even ended up where they are today? People organized, demanded more, and now those of us that want it get two days off instead of zero and overtime pay for working more.
I don't think laws are the answer; to me, the government is a useless spineless thing holding us back. Organization is the answer. And it is the only way anything changes. What they are doing is not futile.
@ 88. That's an insightful summary of the first few chapters of "Oliver Twist."
So I don't see anything "utopian" about working to improve the minimum wage; it's been done elsewhere with positive results.
Ah, thank you so much!
This is much easier for us to understand, now that you've told everyone that you're assuming the part of Fagin.
Anybody saying that fast food workers don't deserve living wages had better not rely on fast food for any part of their sustenance. I want to see all of you wage-deniers make your own foods from scratch from now on, and then turn around and try to act like fast food workers are still somehow beneath you all. Go on, we're waiting.