The intellectual bankruptcy – or perhaps honesty deficit – of the SEIU is on full display in this article:
Members of the Service Employees International Union are in the New Orleans area today to criticize what they call low wages for McDonald’s employees.
Those low wages are a direct result of supply and demand. In the weeks following Katrina, fast food workers in this area were getting paid between $10 and $20 an hour, with signing bonuses of up to $1,000 if you stayed on three months. Restaurants didn’t have enough staff to stay open all day, seven days a week. Most fast food places were open from 6am to 3pm, with a limited menu. And the lines were around the block. Now things are back to normal. (Which is not to say that the city is entirely rebuilt. Nor do I think it should be entirely rebuilt.) Wages have dropped to more or less their pre-Katrina levels because it’s a low skilled, entry level job which does not command a higher wage. Pretending that this is unfair is ridiculous. You want better wages, build a solid work history and move up to a better job. Get some job training – even if that means checking books out of the library and studying on your own time. I went from no job skills and minimum wage jobs to owning a small web development company (pre-Katrina I had employees, now it’s just me) via a secretarial course I took while pregnant and on welfare and a whole lot of studying on my own time. Aside from the fact that poverty isn’t what it used to be, we live in a country where a guy living in a homeless shelter can start with $25 and ten months later have an apartment, a pickup truck, and $5,000 in savings. No lottery tickets needed. He started with an entry level job and worked his way into a better one.
In its quest for more members and consequently power, the SEIU makes demands and engages in class warfare – pretending that another .50 or $1.00 an hour is going to improve matters rather than cost people their jobs. It’s disgraceful.
Other than about falling out at those wages (around here you’re lucky to make minimum wage in fast food), I cracked up when I noticed that your picture is a Burger King burger and the quote is about McDonalds.
Here, they are right across the street from each other and I guess most people are McDonald’s fans … as BK’s drive-thru line is rarely busy and McD’s can take forever to get through. But, I honestly think BK has better burgers.
I can’t imagine anyone working in fast food making that much money though!
Now fast food wages are only slightly above minimum wage… it was purely a supply and demand thing – they were desperate for workers and they paid accordingly.
I had that Burger King graphic from a post earlier this month and just re-used it. Lazy!
I don’t want to get into a discussion about the establishment of wages. I do want to point out that the vast majority of internet commentators do not actually understand the principles of the supply and demand model. For instance, most people don’t grasp the fact that supply and demand are almost entirely unrelated and neither has any concrete effect on the other. When people talk about these principles they generally mean quantity supplied and quantity demanded, which are components of actual supply and demand but they are not the whole thing.
I’m not accusing you of this, I’m just soapboxing about the internet as a whole and wishing that most people would read more rather than believing the talking heads on cable news.