Put The Chicken Before The Nugget

There’s a fast-food worker strike brewing.  What started in NYC as essentially a protest has gained populist steam in larger cities across the country.  People working in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and similar places are agitating for an increase in their wages. The workers state that it’s impossible to live on $7 or $8 an hour in New York.  Or Chicago.  Or San Franscisco.  And they’re right.

But they’re also wrong.  These jobs – unskilled and entry-level – aren’t supposed to be jobs you make a living wage at.  These are the kinds of jobs the minimum wage laws were designed for, the kinds of jobs that the employer would absolutely pay you much less to do, if the Federal Government would only let them.  Once you’ve gone from table-wiper to order-taker to fry-o-later wrangler to grill guy, there’s really nowhere else to go unless you want to be the manager, which requires an entirely different set of skills.  Sorry, fast-food workers, but you’re not doing the kinds of jobs you’re supposed to support a family doing.

Yet… many of them are trying to do exactly that.  And failing, of course, simple arithmetic proves you can’t feed a family of four with two parents doing minimum-wage jobs.  The profile of the fast-food worker has changed over the past decade, and what was once the province of the high-school first-job-taker or retiree with too much time on his hands has now become the land of uneducated mid- to late-twenties fathers and mothers.  These are people who would once have been receptionists, or simple laborers, or factory workers.  Except those jobs don’t exist any more, and the living wages those jobs provided vanished too.

The real problem here is not that McDonald’s pays minimum wage for horrible jobs, it’s that people who would otherwise be productive members of the American workforce are relegated to those horrible jobs instead of working a solidly middle-class job they might have enjoyed twenty or thirty years ago.  Do you think a grown man with a wife and two kids actually wants to take your order at McDonald’s?  Of course he doesn’t, but it’s the best job he could get.  Which is a modern tragedy.

So what’s the solution?  If it were a simple problem I’d have a simple solution and I’d be a billionaire.  Full disclosure: I’m not a billionaire.  I do know that employers – even evil corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart who routinely abuse and take advantage of their workforce – cannot pay a family-supporting living wage for unskilled labor.  But they could pay more than they do now.  And they could pay for health care benefits.  And they could work with local employment agencies to help their mid-twenties workers who shouldn’t be trying to make a career out of a minimum-wage job in the first place.  At least part of the solution is for these fast-food companies to recognize that their workforce is drastically different now than it was even five years ago, let alone twenty, and to adjust their wages, prices, and expectations accordingly.

Another part of the solution would be to repair the middle class that the NeoCons have so expertly dismantled over the past 30 years.  That’s going to take a lot of work, because older people have just accepted the terrible changes to our society and younger people have never known anything else.  Maybe this new wave of activism and populism will shake things up again.  Fingers crossed.