BurgerKing gave candy to worker who never took sick day. The internet gave $400k | Hacker News Reader

BurgerKing gave candy to worker who never took sick day. The internet gave $400k

npr.org

56 pointsrntn72 comments

> "I think they just wanted to show my employer and other CEOs that people deserve to be congratulated, rewarded, even just acknowledged for their hard work and dedication," he said.

Even if his employer or other CEOs saw the crowdfunding (what are the odds they even browse those kinds of sites?), surely this would just reinforce their belief that it's okay to underpay and undervalue their employees because someone else will just pick up the tab?

This story you read is on NPR, not a crowdfunding website. The executives have most certainly come across this because every public company of this size employs some type of public communications professional to monitor things like this.

BTW, The point of crowdfunding campaigns is not to change the hearts and minds of CEOs. The goal is to remind the public how unappreciated their hard work and service actually is to the executives.

Well you have to think about it from the company’s point of view. I mean, if you start treating one employee as a human being with emotions and needs, then the rest of them are going to want the same treatment, and then the whole balance sheet immediately gets shot to hell.

I think it's good the reward is small. Otherwise it would "force" employees to not call sick days to get the big reward

This way it's just a small thing to recognize someone who (hopefully) didn't get sick in any of the days thay had to work

I don't see the point of any award for people who never call in sick as it encourages people to come in sick and spread around whatever they have, even if the award is only symbolic.

Also, not getting sick is not a personal achievement that's up to you, unless you live like Bubble Boy[1], it can happen to anyone even if you're usually healthy as a horse and take care of yourself. Accidents can happen if you leave the house and viruses spread around if you socialize a lot.

It also fosters a culture where you get looked down if you have more sick days than others, as if it's a competition, even in places where sick leave is legal.

I've lost track of how many times I got sick from someone form the office who came in coughing and sneezing, even though we live in Europe where you can take sick leave without any repercussions, but NO, they felt that their work for the company was more important than their health or the health of their colleagues and didn't want to be looked down as a weakling who takes sick leave every time they get the sniffles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_Boy_(film)

The irony is that amongst food service workers, calling in sick is judged quite heavily. One or two people not showing up to a shift can completely screw up a restaurant's ability to deliver for the night. It doesn't help that calling in sick is the only surefire way to get a day off when you need one, so it's easy to assume that people are lying when they say they're too sick to work.

However, it's also pretty common for people to come to work sick, as these are jobs that don't pay you on the days you don't work, regardless of the reason. If you have a choice between taking a Sudafed and powering through, or not paying your rent that month, which are you going to choose?

The difference between how people are treated in the food service industry and tech is so stuck. I worked in the former for a decade and it eroded my self-worth. Nobody in tech would stay in a place that treated employees 1/10 as badly, not for a day.

Sounds like a good case for nation-wide unionization of service workers.

Have fun with that. There is an army of teenagers who would be more than glad to pick up the empty positions.

Unionization is orthogonal to labor oversupply. In fact it's who unions should be for.

No there isn't. Most teenagers don't want fast food jobs or any other job that won't help them get into college, and most of those who do already have one.

Did something change in the last decade where teenagers suddenly stopped liking having money?

Yes. It's been a gradual change, but it's become really evident over the last decade. It's not that they don't want money, but extra-curriculars have a lot more importance on college applications, and those prevent part time jobs.

Also, multi-player video games are occupying kids free time, and don't require the folding money that previous hobbies like cars did.

Yes. Places stopped paying reasonable wages as they were too busy funneling it to CXO's/shareholders while completely losing track of the plot that there is no guarantee laborers are going to back what you're doing. Frankly, I like the change.

Cheaper entertainment.

Do you have stats on that or something? When I was a teenager (late 2000s) you definitely wanted a “good on college application job”, but you probably didn’t get it. At that point you wanted a “walking around money” job like MacDonallds, but you didn’t get that either because adults were taking all the teen summer jobs since things were so tight.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/yout...

Kids are no more deserving of abuse than grownups.

How many teenagers can staff a Burger King at noon on a Wednesday?

Will those teenagers hate to be paid better?

Even worse in food service, because coming in sick doesn't only get your coworkers sick. It also gets your customers sick. And this guy works in an international airport, so those customers are then spreading that illness everywhere in the world.

Do those restaurants know that they can just not open on a given day for technical reasons if someone becomes sick and no replacement is available?

In some cases it probably comes down to paying rent but in others probably just the owners want to squeeze out more cash by never letting the property not make money

>Do those restaurants know that they can just not open on a given day for technical reasons if someone becomes sick and no replacement is available?

Won't someone please think of the owners' profits? /s

The owner of the restaurant is the one who would make that decision. And that would be them deciding not to make money, so fat chance.

But even ignoring the owner, not opening means that everybody else who works in the restaurant also doesn't get paid. If prep for the shift has started before the person called out, what do you do with perishable product?

On top of that, closing for a night means unexpectedly having to cancel reservations which comes with a reputation hit. Sorry to cancel your anniversary plans with 45 minutes notice!

I think you meant "management understaffing a restaurant can completely screw up a restaurant's ability to deliver for the night."

Things like this shouldn't be incentivized at all.

Imagine police giving reward for not reporting crimes or HR giving rewards for not reporting sexual harassments.

> Otherwise it would "force" employees to not call sick days to get the big reward

they are already forced to not call in sick by the fact they don't get paid sick leave

i can't believe you're sincerely making this argument i'm actually disturbed you exist. i hope you are trolling

There's no need to be so terribly offended at just a suggestion with a reasonable foundation. You know that if BK gave 50% of whatever they saved from no sick days then we'd have an npr article about how exploitative it is to incentivize these people to come into work and you'd be here severely disturbed in any event.

If Burger King gave him no gift at all, he'd be $400K poorer.

Fast food worker who never called in sick when they were sick and risked infecting others? Disgusting. You cannot possibly tell me that a human never once got sick

I wonder if there might be some structural problems in American labor policy that incentivize this kind of behavior

Not really. While sick days are depressingly few in America, they DO exist. The fact this person took none of them is just nasty.

Yes there is. Don’t show up don’t get paid. That is a powerful motive.

Quoting the source:

Like Ford, many restaurant workers don't get paid sick leave

    As a single father with three daughters, Ford never took sick days because frankly, he couldn't afford to.

    Ford's job — like more than half of restaurant and accommodation jobs as of 2020 — does not offer paid sick leave, meaning workers typically do not get paid for missing work due to illness unless they dip into their paid vacation time.

Yep looks like I was wrong and this is even more disgusting than not calling in sick. I was under the false assumption that every non-exempt employee had 5 days minimum (which isn’t a lot), but restaurants workers have different laws applied to them? Bad look USA.

Paid vacation time is paid sick time. It's paid time off either way.

Vacation time is often rejected, especially on short notice.

I never understand having a repository of 'sick days' as if they're holidays.

You should just be able to call in sick when really sick and for as long as needed. Verified by a doctor of course.

And your employer would be forced to pay your salary indefinitely? No wonder they seek to limit this. In Europe companies only pay for your sick leave for maybe 30 days, after that money start coming from social security fund (.I.e. you are paid by government)

"paid by your government" = we pay taxes and elect a government to manage those funds for many purposes, one of them is so when WE get sick (the taxpayers) OUR money take care of us.

The money doesn't come from the government, it comes from the taxpayers. The governments are supposed to do what they promised to do with our money via their election peogrammes.

(In an ideal world that is...)

Yes, if you want to be nitpicking then government money is tax money.

However that means that cost of the sick leave is spread over the whole society and not a single company, or single manager’s budget, making it easier to accept for business owners.

That’s why Europeans typically do not have to worry about being paid for sick leave, unlike Americans.

Yeah but it's not like the sick time is limited here in Europe.

My colleagues in the US are often like "I won't call in sick because I have no sick days left". That's dangerous en counterproductive.

Where the money comes from is a secondary issue.

Verified by a doctor? Why would you waste a doctor's time for a cold? That sounds horribly inefficient. They don't have time for that

I've worked for companies that accept "3 sick days throughout the year without medical certificate". In order to be efficient and trouble-free.

Once the magic number 3 was reached, the employer would ask that a doctor issues a "not fit for work for X days" to avoid abuse of this facilitation.

In the UK people can self-certify as being unfit to work for up to 7 days, after which they need a "fit note" (which is more commonly called a "sick note") from a healthcare professional.

Additionally workers are guaranteed £109.40 ($139.33) a week in statutory sick pay (paid by the employer) for up to 28 weeks of time off for illness.

For contrast, the median weekly full-time income is £640 ($815) so it's potentially a big drop in pay for being off work sick - we have one of the lowest rates in developed nations - but it's better than getting nothing.

In most cases, you call the office and they'll prepare a note for you to pick up later. Especially if it's a cold a and the doctor can't do anything besides telling you to stay home. They also don't want sick people in their office.

It depends on the country. In some countries you can be sick for a couple of days without needing it. In others the company can decide to send you to the company doctor or labour institution doctor (like in Holland). Or for them to visit you if you're not capable.

The way this works is generally quite flexible. Do you do this every other week then yes the first day you will be sent for a cert. If it's once a year they won't bother.

That's how it works in Colombia, BTW.

I’ve worked in a half dozen restaurants. Exactly zero of them offers paid sick days.

I was sick a long time ago, 13 or 14 years. I work from home only since covid, before that I worked in an open space office.

I guess he didn't have sick days, only vacation days he wanted to save for (one assumes) spending time with his family. So, a very tough position for him to be in, and an easy one to sympathize with. But yeah, in general, it is not heroic or laudable to go to work when you're sick, which is probably why he looked back at his 20 years and said "don't be like me".

> Ford's job — like more than half of restaurant and accommodation jobs as of 2020 — does not offer paid sick leave

Just to make sure that you know who to be angry at.

This doesn't matter much because the restaurant industry in the U.S. has a very strong culture of not taking leave of _any_ kind since it messes up everyone else's schedule. It is usually the employees themselves who enforce this unwritten rule on each other by intense peer pressure.

This is a "feel good" story from an American's perspective while the rest of the world sees everything about it as pure horror.

The standard term to name this is Orphan Crushing Machine [1]

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine

100% accurate. This post from 2 years ago shows how common this is in America, we have ongoing commentary on it:

> Every "heartwarming" human interest story in the United States is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used.

src: https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1309325764739858432

We have Orphan Crushing Machines because they keep real estate prices up.

Orphans lower home values, so city governments buy Orphan Crushing Machines to keep the neighborhood “nice.”

And not a rare one, there's regularly depressing crowdfunding for people struggling to get basic things in the US (met by incredible donations for sure). The culture makes it acceptable, it's weird.

Acceptable is not the right word. It's just more acceptable than your friend not having enough money to treat their cancer or be financially ruined by a car accident. ~2/3 of people in the US support single-payer health care, but the downward pressure from the insurance industry suppresses it.

>~2/3 of people in the US support single-payer health care

I think that support massively goes down when the likes of fox news runs FUD headline about how people in the UK are dying due to long waiting times, coming to the conclusion that single payer systems are BAD, private-only healthcare is GOOD.

People can easily be manipulated by mass UFD to vote against their own best interests.

I got my info based on recent Pew data that broke it down into political categories, which Das obviously lower on the right, but still substantial. The public option of the ACA— which was essentially medicare for all— was single-handedly blocked by democratic senator Joe Liberman of Connecticut who gets a fuckton of support from the insurance industry. This is much less about what people want and much more about what insurance companies will allow to happen. Sure there's disinformation and partisan asshattery but don't forget who's really pulling the strings.

Does the "rest of the world" include China? India? The entire African continent?

Those three regions alone make up the majority of the "rest of the world", and I'm pretty sure an unskilled laborer from any of them would be delighted to come to the United States and work at Burger King.

Even relatively desirable countries (e.g., Canada) have a gross imbalance, on a per capita basis, between people emigrating to the United States and and people emigrating from the United States to their country. The imbalance would be much worse if the United States didn't have restrictions on immigration.

People vote with their feet, mang.

They're looking on in horror because "you have all this money and and things are still like this?"

The rest of the world was raised on the Hollywood portrayal of a rich country of bounty where the only people suffering were either drug addicts or in some other country

no, even American's look at this with horror. Only media and executives see this with anything else

I mean, the whole point of the 400k thing is that people were pissed about it. Nobody is championing the corporation here.

Pissed at the corporation enough to subsidize them by 400k? Who do you think benefits when workers are paid wages by crowdfunding?

Off topic: text.npr.org

That's a great text only version of a major news site, really liking it.

EDIT:

It appears the link has been changed. The original posting of this was link to

https://text.npr.org/2023/08/22/1194950552/burger-king-worke...

I really like that NPR has a text only version. It’s great for accessibility. It’s also great got plain old aesthetics.

The internet is too cluttered.

Someone has to work fast food jobs, and there is no shame in it. But why the fuck was he there for 20 years? The guy wasted 20 years. If he'd called in sick and gone to a job interview he'd have been richer and happier and more socially useful etc...

You got plenty of downvotes, I think it was the use of words and not the actual message/meaning. I wholeheartedly agree with you. At SOME point he could have gotten a better paying job, or get a promotion, etc.

Perhaps the circumstances were such that this would be one of the very specific gigs (working hours, convenient shifts, distance from home, etc.)

But still it also baffled me why he was in the same job, restaurant, company for 20 years in today's world.

I honestly couldn't think is a nicer way to put it without being facetious. I am a cynic so I likely deserve the downvotes...

Exactly what job are you hiring this guy for?

> "Don't be like me."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com