Last week fast food employees across the nation took to the streets to protest low wages. As one of the largest fast food chains in the world McDonalds is often the target of these protests. Of course given that the average McDonald's employee receives some of the lowest wages in the industry at around $7.73 per hour it should as no surprise that McDonalds often takes center stage in the “fight for 15” campaign.
As with any good protest the idea is to bring attention to issue and sway public opinion. If the protesters can generate enough bad press and consumer pressure the corporations may be compelled to change their habits.
The goal of $15 per hour is likely a pipedream but with around $8.5 billion in income, $3.5 billion in dividend payments, and another $67 million in executive compensation it seems McDonald’s can afford to increase wages some. Asking for more than you expect to receive is standard practice in any sort of negotiations so starting at $15 per hour makes sense as an initial offer.
The problem for workers is that unless management at McDonalds decides to raise wages or improve benefits they will need their own team of negotiators to represent them. They will also need a structure to approve any agreement. Without this, each employee will be left to fend for themselves – a situation that clearly has and will continue to favor the multi-billion dollar corporation.
Unfortunately as soon as employees retain the services of an organization that can help them negotiate better compensation they will also make enemies of those who believe such organizations are "evil".
My colleague Kathryn Hoekstra offers a couple examples of this mentality. Kathy sees the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) working with fast food employees and thinks their motives are anything but altruistic. To her they are nothing but a greedy, self-serving, power hungry organization.
But how is that different than McDonalds? If spending money trying to gain more members makes the SEIU power hungry then the $1 billion in advertising McDonalds spends each year should be a concern as well. If the SEIU executive compensation of around $3 per member shows how greedy unions bosses are then the $77 per employee being paid to McDonalds executives should be much more troubling. If the 6% profit margin average for the fast food industry is meant to illustrate that these companies commitment to their employees what does that say for the SEIU's 5.9% profit margin? More over what does that say about McDonald's with its 19.8% margin?
The reality is both of McDonald's and the SEIU are free market, capitalist entities. Their goals of increasing income and users of their product are the same. Suggesting that the one that benefits the average worker is nefarious and immoral while the one that benefits shareholders and the wealthy is the epitome of American ideals and should be revered is an odd double standard.
Another peculiar argument is that raising employee wages will mean a more expensive Big Mac. Given the current problem with obesity in this country making a Big Mac less affordable certainly doesn't seems like a national catastrophe but it should be noted that taxpayers already contribute around $1.2 billion each year in public assistance to McDonald's employees. It certainly doesn't seem very moral to ask taxpayers to subsidize McDonald's workforce while they shell out billions to shareholders and keep billions more in profit.
Of course even the scariest of predictions leaves McDonalds with around $400 million in profit without touching a single dime of shareholders earnings or raising the price of a single menu item. Clearly that would fall short of McDonald's typical earnings but how many billions of dollars does a company really need to be comfortable?
In the end the data shows that fast food workers would see a significant increase in wages and benefits with union membership and regardless of the doomsday rhetoric plenty of other countries do just as well if not better than the US with considerably higher unionization rate.
So while capitalist zealots will belittle fast food workers by pretending their low wages accurately reflect their "value" the reality is that if the SEIU gets involved these employees are likely to see a sudden and dramatic increase in their "value". This reality seems to be very troubling for some people but the question is why? When did the public become more protective of corporate profits than the general welfare of working Americans?
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