Fight for $15 swells into largest protest by low-wage workers in US history

We have 77 years of history proving raising minimum wage is absurdly ineffective at enabling individuals to climb out of minimum wage jobs.

Yes, one can indefinitely raise minimum wage every few years (as we have been since 1938), but that doesn't provide long term growth for the individuals trying to live on it.

Providing better and cheaper/easier access to higher education and high-skilled job training has proven time and time again to be the only permanent solution which lifts individuals out of minimum wage jobs.

The issue isn't that owners will fare worse, but that raising the min wage while it makes us feel good won't necessarily help lower income workers. Doubling the salary of an entry level position will only reduce the number of entry level positions. And as I'm sure your experience in fast food illustrated, there's some people who aren't even worth paying min wage. Except for a few management folks, it shouldn't be a long term job or career.

Also, he had a lot of longer term employees who were making more than min wage, but still would benefit if it was raised. So it became more economical to let them go, despite the loss of their higher productivity.

Also, you can't just think in terms of the hourly rate. Increases in the hourly rate also affect worker's comp rates, Social Security contributions, etc. So an $8 increase would probably be at least a $10 cost increase to the owner.

Outside of that though, raising prices immediately hurts sales, but worse customer service due to the restaurant being chronically short-staffed takes longer to hurt sales. Being chronically short-staffed also makes for a worse working environment which leads to employee turnover, which is more costly in the long run, but when you're struggling to make rent this month, the long term costs may not be as apparent.

Finally, if it's a small restaurant where the owner also helps with the day-to-day operations of restaurant (maybe they're even the chef), it mean's they'll have to work even harder. The owner may just find it worth the cost to have an extra employee and be able to work just a little bit less.

I'd guess the much smaller market (35m inhabitants vs 320m - Australia has 22m), the weather, the distance from production centres and major ports, and so on would impact prices as well.

As for beer it might be taxes, which Wikipedia says are amongst the highest in the world.

I can make the similar much healthier, tastier, and cheaper than they can.

People with completed unskilled jobs that could be performed by a twelve year old if labor laws allowed. An unfortunately high number of unskilled, unmotivated people take jobs at places like McDonalds with no ambition to do anything better.

Raising the minimum wage ONLY raises the minimum wage in terms of earning, so yes it squeezes the middle class as their earning comes closer to the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage results in inflation and raising costs; this directly impacts the middle class.

Quite frankly many of these are also providing services that just aren't necessary; they are purely convenience. People only have so much money to spend, so raising prices results in fewer sales as some people will switch to substitute goods. In the example I'm working with here, buying groceries and cooking at home is a cheaper substitute good for McDonalds; as the cost of McDonalds raises more people will substitute this with cooking at home.

This is just the basics of supply and demand. So yes, "these people", anyone with a low paying unskilled job should be doing anything in their power to develop needed and in demand jobs so they can raise their earning potential. Aside from the few that move up to managerial roles at a place like McDonalds there is no earning potential. These are the types of places where you get hired with no prior job experience or skills. They are not now, nor have they been in my lifetime, sustainable careers.

As I mentioned in another reply, the point was more to recalibrate understandings of the money size involved than to specifically speak to this discussion.

I'm not sure how you "corrected" for the number of franchises, then... if you did it by accounting all worldwide profit as for US franchises that is not a "correction". And regardless of the correction remember not to party too hard with "profit" amounts right now when McDonalds may very well go negative in the near future; the point I'm trying to make survives that, but it would make hash of yours. Profit is not guaranteed!

Somewhere online I saw a list of the profit margins of all the Fortune 100. Single-digit percentages were the norm. I was unable to google it up for this.

"> Capitalism is very efficient...

People are not. People making minimum wage don't always have the flexibility to take risks that would allow them to advance. "

That's a complete nonsequitor. And moreover it's a frankly stupid accusation of me you're trying to implicitly make. Give me the button to push to make everyone in the world effectively as rich as billionaires and somehow it all works out with no negative effects, and I'd push it in a heartbeat. I'd love to manifest Iain Bank's Culture. It sounds great.

But in the real world, we have to work with what resources we have, and we don't actually have anywhere near as many as people think. The rich may be rich, but divide their riches up somehow perfectly efficiently amongst everybody, and we all get a lot less than our generally-innumerate intuitions are telling us we would.

Fair. $4/hour then, which is still less than we're talking about. I rather suspect I'm lowballing the labor by about 2x, also, if not more, but I'll stick with my numbers below.

"$15 minimum wage is only in the US, not worldwide. Although McDonalds does pay its workers more than $15 in some parts of the world, and somehow manages to stay in business despite the ruthless efficiency of capitalism "

I very deliberately did not try to calculate the price of raising minimum wage, because I do not have that data. I very deliberately calculated what they even theoretically could pay additionally across the board, because I think even at ~4$/hour, people are still going to be surprised at how small that number is! I do not think that when people think "Oh, big companies are just using people as wage slaves and sucking oodles of value out of everyone's pockets" that they're thinking "McDonalds is making about $4/hour/person." I think people think that McDonalds is making at least $dozens/hour/person, but there's no way that's the case.

Also, McDonalds has a lot of people who get more than minimum wage. They've got stacks of professionals, accountants, managers business people, etc. But, contra what LesZedCB asserts, you can't make up for it by just taking it out of their paycheck, because then those people will on the margins go work for someone else... plus these are still generally speaking middle class people (not even upper middle class here, I'm sure!), not people getting "rich". And if you do just try to take it out of a few execs hands, well, we're back to the problem where even all of McDonalds profits being reallocated back to the workers doesn't do as much as people think.

There is no scenario where McDonalds can pay enough to make a front-line order taker a "middle class" job.

"It's a mistake to talk about profits as a percentage of revenue because the profit is distributed to very few hands."

The board of directors do not just walk off with the profits. That's not how this works, and it's the sort of criticism that makes this sort of argument hard to take seriously. Where it does go is complicated, but theoretically it eventually ends up in the stockholders hands, and "the set of people who own McDonalds stock" is extremely widely distributed. The executives generally get a good chunk of stock and that's how they get the money, but in order to pay the executives "lots" it also means paying out to the rest of the stockholders "lots and lots and lots", and a lot of that stock is also ultimately going to middle class holders via various funds.

And again, my point is to work on recalibrating your understanding of just how much money "$1.5Billion" isn't, rather than argue for or against any particular policy. It isn't anywhere near as impressive as it sounds. It is not an infinite money fountain that can be easily "just" handed out to employees en masse and simply isn't Because Greed. And given the variance we experienced between quarters, it's a money fountain that can in the blink of an eye become Negative $1 Billion Dollars, even with labor costs where they are now. It's way more temperamental and way more fragile than it looks.