Don't Like Welfare? Then Demand A Liveable Wage for Workers!

Fast food workers demand higher wages in August.

Question: When was the last year a worker earning $90 a week (net) could live on it? I am talking about food, rent, and transport etc. The answer is 1968, when the dollar was worth approximately 4.5 times what it is now. I can vouch for this because I was such a worker, at an Oil Company in New Orleans, taking a hiatus from university studies. As a geologist's assistant responsible for preparing geological stratum sections (disclosing salt domes), I took home 90 bucks a week, and I also needed no welfare support to make it.

The rent for my efficiency apartment,  located in the upscale Garden District (off St. Charles Avenue, and 3 blocks from Loyola) came to  $75 a month.  My electric bill was usually about $30 a month and groceries came to about $35 a week, and that was being extravagant - with fare such as steaks, shrimp, etc.. Add in going out to eat at the 'Buck Forty Nine' twice a week and food came to around $40 or so a week. Transport was a cinch at 15 bucks a month. It cost one thin dime to get on the St. Charles trolley and go directly to my job on Lee Circle, and one thin dime to get back. Add in the trolley fare for dates, escorting Loyola coeds to the Saenger Orleans downtown on Canal St. for a flick, then dinner, and you had the balance.

Now, fast forward to today's workers earning 90 bucks a week take home. Do they even exist and if so can they make it? Not likely! A fast food worker earning $7.25 an hour today and putting in a 40 hour week will stand to take home just over $246, or more than two and a half times what I earned.  But can he or she afford to live like I did? Hell no! Rents in most urban areas start at around $650 a month if you're lucky. In the same area I lived in New Orleans 44 years ago, they're now $780 a month and more. How is a worker earning only $246 a week going to make it, with also having to shell out at least $100 a week for groceries, and likely $150 a month for utilities (electric, gas, water). Add in cost for transport, even if the worker is lucky enough not to need a car (to which maintenance costs must be added) and you have a small economic nightmare.

"Do the math" as they say, and you find the workers such as those shown will always end up short and without enough to eat, or to pay for medical needs. No surprise then, that they will need additional monetary input which I didn't need in 1968. (And NO, it isn't fair or right to tell them to "work two jobs". That's the response of an asshole.) 

I bring this up because a new study on behalf of the National Employment Law Project has disclosed that "about 52 percent of the fast food workforce receive some kind of public assistance, compared with 25 percent of the general workforce." (Denver Post, 'Fast Food Help Takes A Big Bite Out of Welfare', p. 12A, Oct. 16)

The study also found that California led the country with $717 million spent in welfare for those workers. The study was completed by the University of California- Berkeley Law Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Commenting on the dismal stats, Corrine Fowler of the Colorado Progressive Coalition was quoted:

"It's pretty outrageous that workers can't meet their basic necessities even after working 40 hours."

Indeed, and this is why fast food workers in nearly 60 cities had pressed for a living wage - defined as $15 an hour - to help them meet their basic needs, which again, are no where near as extravagant as the welfare haters would have you believe.

Doing the math, as I showed above, indicates that only a totally uninformed putz (or math deficient putz), Tea Party idiot or asshole would bitch about people getting welfare who are working hard - at least 40 hours a week - and can't make it, so need government assistance.

Author Charles Reich is blunt in his book  ‘Opposing the System’, Crown Books, pp. 125-126:

“The claim that government is free to reduce or cut off welfare and other forms of support for people in economic need is totally mistaken. Welfare is not a gift, nor is it, despite frequent assertions, a transfer from those who earn a living to those who are not.  Welfare is rather an obligation from society – and from those who are working- to those who have been deprived of work and the opportunity to earn a living. If we want to speak of transfers, it would be more accurate to say that those with a secure place in the economic system are enjoying a transfer of wealth from those who have been excluded from the economic system. Welfare then is partial compensation for a deprivation of livelihood that allows others to work.”

Clearly, a welfare model then must be based on the premise that welfare is an obligation from society and not a ‘gift’ or Freebie, i.e. reluctant transfer from the working to the non-working.

As Barbara Ehrenreich, the author of 'Nickel and Dimed' , noted, working at Walmart didn't even help her pay both food and rent at a dump motel. She had to go on food stamps to survive. (At least with that one 40 hr. job). There is a real moral problem here too, since without a living wage, economic warfare is all that remains- with each little person fighting and struggling against each other little person for survival.

Predictably, of course, the Employment Policies Institute declared if they paid any such living wage their profit margins would collapse unless they raised prices, and Cheeze Louise, the Customer demands low prices!

Puh-leeze! The Economic  Policy Institute has found the needed increase would be minimal and not kill any fast food addict's budget.  As an example, your bare bones special "dollar burger" from the BK  "Dollar menu" would go up to maybe $1.25. Big freakin' deal! Look, if you can afford a buck you can sure as shit also afford a buck twenty-five. NO one in his right mind is going to argue and tell me that a paltry 25 cents will spell the difference between buying the damned burger and not buying it!

Besides, after you cough up that extra quarter or whatever, you then won't have to bitch about so many getting welfare!

YES! Give Those Fast Food Workers A Living Wage!

The workers in the photo are upset and on strike, as they have every  right to be. Their wages are pathetic, most at a $7.25/hr minimum wage, and as one explained on an ABC News segment two nights ago (to finance reporter Rebecca Jarvis) there is no way they can survive on such pay, or feed a family or pay rent and medical bills. The worker then looked Jarvis in the eyes and asked her: "You put yourself in my place. How would you get through?" Jarvis could only blink a few times before cutting away, back to Dianne Sawyer in the studio.

Look, this is serious shit, especially as we approach Labor Day. It is not fodder by which to make insipid sport, say by posting images on a hate blog showing a person dressed in a fast food uniform (which could have come from anywhere)  spitting on food and then using that as a basis to piss on them and argue they deserve nothing. That sort of shtick is the sign of sick mind. One that needs ECT or perhaps a neural implant to ameliorate whacko tendencies.

These morons, also profoundly ignorant (but likely derived from their moron IQ status)  insist that fast food industry workers are the dummies because, hey, the job is supposed to be "entry level" only! DOH!  Well, tell that to the hundreds of Intel and other tech workers in Colo. Springs who were all tossed out of their jobs back in 2004-05  (due to companies closing or moving operations overseas) and are now working at Safeway, Burger King, KFC, McDonald's and Chili's. Their wages now, most of them, are barely one third what they used to earn. With it, the fortunes of the city itself have plummeted since obviously less is collected in taxes, and city services have also declined. Hence the stories people across the U.S. heard the past two years of COS turning off street lights, shuttering schools and allowing the weeds to grow to monstrous proportions on meridians and other public places.


The backstory here? Evidently, the loss of 15 million American jobs via globalization hasn't been processed by the dummies who still believe fast food jobs are "entry level". Newsflash! Fast food jobs, along with other service jobs (as waitresses etc. with a $2.13 /hr minimum wage and only tips to live off) are now the working NORM!   Because the jobs pyramid has collapsed, especially since the financial meltdown in 2008, these are the about the only jobs people (including many recent college grads) can get!

This also explains why, as noted in a July 29 Denver Post article:

"Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data, engulfing more than 76% of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge to be published next year in the Oxford University Press."


The Post article noted that "measured across all races" the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79% or nearly 4 in 5. Pardon me, but this indicates a nation of rising inequality and the degradation of most citizens in terms of their economic welfare. One of the reasons is that there are now too few decent paying jobs, by which I mean, paying a living wage - not a minimum wage. This is not adequate to raise  a family on and indeed it is one of the factors creating government dependency that the Rightist deplore.

But they can't have it both ways! If the Rightists scream and yowl at any proposed increase in the minimum wage - yes to at least $15 an hour- they can't also scream and yowl about the increasing use of food stamps!  Obviously, people -families have to eat and if $7.25/hr is inadequate to feed a family then they are going to have to get food stamps to make it to the end of the month! (Indeed, this is one of the strategies McDonald's, for example, recommends, in order to "make ends meet."  Meanwhile, Walmart offers advice on how to secure gov't health insurance via assorted programs such as SCHIP.)

To read some of the Righties' screeds you'd think jobs grew on trees (or fell from the skies), and upward mobility is just a matter of will - not that there is a remaining deficit of some 8 million jobs - which explains why so few college grads are able to pay off their student loan debts. Newsflash! They can't find jobs that pay the rent, provide food and also pay off loans on $8.50- 9.25/hour!

Yes, I also worked at a fast food place (Jackie Gleason's Restaurant in Miami, FL) busing tables - removing refuse such as half-eaten "Norton's hot dogs",  but that was in between quarters at the University of South Florida.  The pay was $1.60 /hour but whatever I saved from the job was ample to pay for my in-state tuition and textbooks. Today, that same type of job has now become a permanent fixture of our service economy and it is the service jobs that dominate. Then assorted idiots wonder why the spending of the American "consumer" has declined in recent years. (Never mind that corporations that could create extra jobs are still sitting on over $1.7 trillion in capital).

As for the claim that increasing fast food workers' wages would increase prices, that also is essentially  bollocks, since the Economy Policy Institute has found the increase would be minimal and not kill any fast food addict's budget.  As an example, your bare bones special "dollar burger" from the BK  "Dollar menu" would go up to maybe $1.25. Big freakin' deal! Look, if you can afford a buck you can sure as shit also afford a buck twenty-five. NO one in his right mind is going to argue and tell me that a paltry 25 cents will spell the difference between buying the damned burger and not buying it!

It is time fast food workers catch a break and their wages are increased to a living wage. They will then be able to buy more -  propping up the sagging economy and stimulating aggregate demand - and they won't have to go on food stamps! Even a moron ought to be able to grasp that!

Not Being Expected To Tip At A Restaurant: More Americans Need to Experience It

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Split scene at Panorama Restaurant at the Fortress HohenSalzburg in Austria

One of the terrific aspects of travel in Germany and Austria was a firm 'Nein!' on any expectation of having to tip. Wherever we went, whether in Munich, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the Zugspitze, Innsbruck or the HohenSalzburg Panorama Restaurant in Salzburg - see image- there was zero expectation of customer gratuity.

Our last night with long time German friends Elli and Reinhart we spent at the  Bräustüberl  Restaurant (actually located in old Garmisch, http://www.braeustueberl-garmisch.de/ ) I asked Reinhart the reasons for the absence of gratuities for servers in Germany. He laughed over a tall brew of Krönig Ludwig and replied: "It's because we believe in paying them real wages here that they can live off!"

He explained that the wage scales were such that health insurance was provided for as well as vacation time and pension benefits. There was simply no need to task a customer to come up with extra dough which, as he knew (from several visits to the States) was merely customer subsidy - letting the employer off the hook. He insisted: "If your restuarants in the States even raised their prices barely a dollar across the board they could afford to pay more decent wage instead of expecting the customer to do what the employer ought to."

He had a point. The system in the U.S. then is really a very poor one, where wait staff basically sign on as indentured servants whose miserly scale pay, at $2.13 /hr. is usually quickly snatched up by the employer to pay whatever "expenses" he can think of, with the employee then scrambling to make enough in tips to pay the rent, or just groceries.  Worse and worse, I wager none of the wait staff in the U.S. get anywhere near the two full weeks vacation that wait staff get in Germany, Austria. I told Reinhart that they were more or less stuck with the "Herman Cain" model of restaurant compensation, reflected in their experiencing triple the poverty rate  of the general U.S. workforce.

Fortunately, a new light seems to have emerged at the proverbial end of the U.S. Miserly Tunnel. Well, at least at one New York City venue: Sushi Yasuda, an upscale place in midtown Manhattan, has opted to provide its staff with a decent salary and benefits package that includes vacation days, sick leave and health insurance. Instead of a tip line, the restaurant notifies their patrons at the bottom of the check:

“Following the custom in Japan, Sushi Yasuda’s service staff are fully compensated by their salary. Therefore gratuities are not accepted.”

Hey! Sounds an awful lot like the custom in most of Germany and Austria!

Of course, inevitably, some customers will always be so conditioned that they give tips whatever the new policy. But at Sushi Yasuda,  any tips the staff does receive goes straight to the house, rather than staff. Meanwhile, food prices have been raised an extra 15 percent to compensate wages, but there’s been no apparent change in customer volume.

Sushi Yasuda’s Co-owner, Scott Rosenberg, told The Price Hike

“The risk is that your prices appear to be high on the menu. But if you have faith in what you’re serving, and how you’re serving it, you know that when your customers have a good meal and look at their final tally it’s going to be around the same.”

Hey, now there's a novel thought! Have faith in what you're serving, then set ther prices accordingly - to meet the goal of providing a living wage for your staff! If your grub is in any good, people will come! They sure do in Germany, and over there the prices are marked in euros with one euro equivalent to about $1.30 U.S.  The meal I had at  Bräustüberl  featured roast duck and potatoes, salad with a dark German beer and ditto for Janice. It came to some 54 euros (27 euro each) or $70.20 U.S. And worth every cent by the way. Besides the server so enjoyed our table we each received a free round of Schnapps.

I would wager a similar model could be employed here in the U.S. say at place like Applebees or Olive Garden and with lower prices relative to what we paid in Europe. For example, Olive Gardens in Denver currently have a special 3-course special Italian dinner for $12.95. I am willing to bet that this might be offered instead at $15.95 and customers will still come and buy it if it's that good. The extra money can then be used to pay real server wages.

Alas, this is perhaps more a pipe dream than realistic. The chains - chain restaurants are more likely committed to the 'Herman Cain' model of meager wage and scrambling for tips - especially if the competition doesn't change but sticks to low dinner costs. This means a large portion of the U.S. work force will never really be able to improve its lot and Americans - perpetually anticipating low food prices - will come to expect restaurants deliver them as is their wont.