- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
California fast food workers will be paid at least $20 per hour next year under a new law signed Thursday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
When it takes effect on April 1, fast food workers in the state will have among the highest minimum wages in the country, according to data compiled by the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. The state’s minimum wage for all other workers is at $15.50 per hour and is already among the highest in the nation.
Newsom’s signature on Thursday reflects the power and influence of labor unions in the nation’s most populous state, which have worked to organize fast food workers in an attempt to improve their wages and working conditions.
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Here’s a (not so) funny anecdote: I went to Italy years ago and got McDonald’s equivalent of a double quarter pounder with cheese for shits and giggles. Dollar for euro, the price was about the same, if not a little cheaper, in Italy. Now couple that with the fact that Italians have access to healthcare, are paid a living wage, and have ample vacation pay.
These companies could pay their workers properly and provide benefits if they wanted to, they have the money. They don’t because fuck you
But did you ever stop to think about how Italy’s system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.
/s (should be obvious, but I’ll put it there to be safe.)
But muh freedumb
Yeah when you think about how many meals they sell in an hour, they probably only need to charge less than 20 cents more for a meal to cover the cost of employees having a livable wage.
If were charging more for your burger in Italy, the difference in price was small enough to be unnoticeable. Because when you do the math, employees wages at a fast food joint isn’t a significant percentage of the price.
They still monkey around the hours in these places to avoid paying any employee too much. I’ve worked in similar industries and you have to fight for shifts, or deal with taking shifts last minute on your days off.
This is also anecdotal but I’ve met a lot of Italians where I now live and they all say pay and working conditions in Italy are poopoo. I suppose it’s all relative though.
Immigrants usually say that.
But central and southern Italy is like in a perpetuate state of Alabama.
yee-a haw
I’ve no idea what that means but I’m sure it’s nice?
This is an awesome victory for fast food workers and unions. People constantly shit on the folks working in customer service and kitchen jobs, but they are often gruelling and unpleasant. The people there certainly deserve it more than the CEOs and shareholders exploiting them (I mean, I’m against the entire structure, but if we’re working within that structure, then ye .).
For people who are afraid that raising wages will mean less people employed: for the most part, wage demand is pretty inelastic. Studies have shown that wages changes really don’t mess with numbers employed that much. Most places only want to employ the least number of people they can already. They can’t go lower, generally.
Of course it doesn’t. The amount of money these people make is insignificant compared to the billions siphoned off by corporations to payout themselves and their shareholders. Wage suppression is about control.
Hopefully this will cause a push to higher wages across the board. California is expensive to live in, and $20 / hr is reasonable, but difficult, to live on.
You can get 20/hr + jobs pretty fucking easily in California
Bullshit. I live in Los Angeles. Good luck getting $20+ / hr anywhere.
Bay area SF SJ area 20 is basicallt the nee minimum, lots of security jobs pay 22-25 for no experience
And the minimum wage in that area should be at least $30-40+ to live there.
Lol. It won’t.
PA over here still having to eat human feces for lunch since minimum wage is still $7.50
In CA we’d have to pay $20 for those feces lol.
Food here is no higher than the rest of the country We produce a ton of food
that doesn’t even buy top shelf fresh organic shit
only preprocessed canned shit shipped from who knows where.
Vote.
Beat me to it
Money is literally worth half of what it was when I graduated high school in the 90s. My senior year I worked as a grocery clerk and made $9.50/hr while in a small city in Oregon (not expensive California). Math works out for me.
Well, there’s this, and this to say you’re right. Had the minimum wage tracked in line with production, it would be ~$26 today. If it had tracked in line with inflation, it would probably be closer to $21.45.
That it’s been flatlined for so long means people working for minimum wage have been getting steady pay cuts for 50 years.
I’ll just leave this here
This website gets posted a lot but the site itself doesn’t really give any context, it’s just nudges and winks. And people posting it never really give any context either.
So here is some more context.
Now what about the rest of everyone? There need to be regulations for everyone, including gig workers, to make more money.
I wonder if McD’s “automated” franchises are the preemptive move by the company expecting more of this to happen. The writing was on the wall and they moved to compensate. They make a big deal of it like it’s some cool thing, but IRL they’re just reducing human overhead.
Businesses are always seeking to replace people with not-people in every way they possibly can so I don’t think you can really draw a cause and effect here.
Brazil have a shit minimum wage and McDonald’s and other fast food restaurants are full with automated cash registries and self service.
They will absolutely replace all the workers with robots the second they can, even at 5.00/hr wages for workers.
Might as well bleed them until then.
That’s always the idle threat, but the reality is that they likely don’t want to invest in the machines anyway.
I think a more likely phenomenon is that some (likely smaller) chains will be like “fuck it” and close up shop in CA.
Or the most likely scenario is that they just pad the prices a little more in CA and keep the chains open.
Long term I think people will just adjust to it and it’ll be normal. Chains that are looking to maintain their “value” positioning will just absorb it out of their profit margins like they do in other localities.
Looking at it from a business perspective, you want to weigh the costs so you automate as much as is economical to reduce to as few unskilled people as possible. A minimum wage person is now about $45k a year in salary and support costs, so if a machine costs $40k a year and removes a worker, you are money ahead.
absorb it out of their profit margins
You’re joking right? this is a satirical post. i mean, it has to be right?
The “automated” stores are less about reduction in labor cost and more about improving the overall operation and growing sales (thus increasing jobs.) It does help labor cost because the labor that is staffed is more efficient, but that’s more of a tertiary outcome. They still employ roughly the same number of staff, and potentially will employ even more as efficiency of the process grows.
Simplest way I can explain this is thinking about the order kiosks. One of the worst parts of fast food is that most people aren’t actually trained at birth how to order right, and secondarily it introduces another couple of humans who are fallible and won’t get it correct. EG: customer comes into McDonald’s and says “I want the whopper basket.” Crew person, internal: “wtf are they talking about, I guess I’ll give them a big mac.” Then the customer comes back pissed off because they actually wanted a quarter pounder with fries, it has to be remade distracting the kitchen, manager, that crew person, etc further.
Also, the entire time the customer is ordering, it’s engaging a whole crew person. To scale up and take more orders, you have to add an additional crew person for each order you want to take concurrently, and because customer flow is not 100% predictable, this isn’t even really possible. Most McDonalds have like 4 kiosks, and you’ll only find that they’re all used at the same time for maybe a grand total 3-4 hours a day. To replicate that with a human, you would have to be like “I need you to work from 7:23-7:59, and you to work 11:46-12:07, and you to work, 12:03-12:07…” which literally no one is going to do, and isn’t actually that predictable regardless. No automation means some customers are going to come in, see a line, and peace out. This means lower sales, and lower overall employees.
With automation, the demand can be filled much more often and a whole massive point of complexity is removed. In the example above, the customer comes in wanting a whopper basket, looks at the menu and goes “oh they call it a quarter pounder here” and clicks the buttons. Because they can now capture more demand, kitchens are busier and there are more orders to deliver, so they move that person who was going to be extremely inefficient by comparison serving customers 1:1, and move them to a kitchen position or to an expo position.)
Found the robot sales person
read the post and reply like a person.
You lost all credibility when you said it was “less about the costs”
I recently hired a mid -level manager from McDs strategy team and it’s at least 90% about cost reduction. They’re watching the adoption curve, because older and urban demographics still mostly order at the counter and refuse to use the self ordering lines. That’s why they offer free fries and free upgrades at select locations for using self ordering to force the greater adoption.
Also they’ve started reducing headcount in locations where adoption is higher, but still limit hours to hourly workers.
It’s all right there if you want to believe it, but good luck with the spin.
Wouldn’t kitchens be the next point of automation?
I mean, they’re definitely working on it, but so far it’s tech that isn’t ready. also, it’s still a similar problem, at least for now. The thing I’ve heard about is automated french fry machines. Basically, a big fryer that places fries into the fryer, and then transfers them to the bagging station. From what I’ve heard, they’re very expensive and don’t work well. But the strategy there is more around improving human foibles - estimating the amount of fries needed for rushes more accurately, etc. The person is still there working the station, but assisted by tech. Also improving capacity. That one person that is supposed to be doing all of the things now has less to do, and so can focus on making sure orders of fries are ready to be bagged by expo people. This means they’re bottlenecked less often, can serve more customers, and thus hire more staff.
I mean, make no mistake, we’re headed towards a mostly automated future for these types of jobs, most likely. Tech will improve, get cheaper, etc. But this has been the way things have been for the last 20-30 years. Watch a drive through in most mcdonalds and they have a machine that makes drinks. Before that, having a machine that dispensed fries into the basket was a luxury. Even the grill being like a big panini press was an innovation. So far, this has all led to more jobs. In the case of fast food, just producing consistent results quickly has led to growth. I’d check out youtube or ticktok. I think McDonald’s even puts out a lot of videos these days showing what’s really happening in the kitchen. It’s a little bit fascinating.
I stopped reading when you said automation increases jobs. But cool story, bro.
You might want to check out, uh, history. It’s rife with “omg this new technology is scary and bad” like the cotton gin, or more recently, computers.
You might want to read a little deeper. Technology always removes jobs. People shift to new jobs. The unknown is if new jobs will exist or if we’re entirely post scarcity.
this is why, famously, there stopped being jobs with the introduction of the wheel.
But when will we finally be free of the pages upon pages of job listings for stable boys. Who will care for all the horses?!
The McD’s or BK’s I have visited with ordering computers and only one till, looks to have around the same number of staff, mostly they just stopped taking orders while packing them.
what was the mininum before?
State wide, $15.50. This will remain in affect until April 1st, 2024.
Automation, here we come!
It’s a good thing we weren’t automating anything before this! Nothing at all. Companies DEFINITELY weren’t researching and implementing automation until right now when the minimum wage increased. And they DEFINITELY will start hiring more people if the wages go down again.
Yep, many fast food places are already implementing AI taking orders in the drive thru, not to mention all the kiosks in the lobby. Only a matter of time until making the food is automated and all there will be is a skeleton crew of workers to make sure everything is running smooth.
This is not a bad thing. It is always a good thing when humans can be freed to do non-repetitive tasks. Or would you prefer to return to weaving your own clothes?
Where did I say it was a bad thing? Lol.
Where did I say you said it’s a bad thing? Lol.
I was visiting a city for a wedding and went to a restaurant I’d never heard of to get food. Turned out to be drivethru only with an AI voice assistant order taker and holy crap was it a fight to get the AI to give me a damn second to read the menu for a place I’d never been. The food was very good though
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So now that ca is at 20$. Why is tipping still a thing?
This is only for fast food workers, who generally don’t get tips.
Who tips fast food workers?
I hope this makes workers…more motivated. With my food.
I hate to burst everyone’s bubble but all this is going to do is speed up fully automated restaurants.
Oh right because this was the only thing keeping businesses from switching to zero wage robots. No companies were already planning on doing this, but now that employees get a livable wage, all bets are off.
I might just be really cynical but that may be why they even agreed to this in the first place.
So that would put it at 31 Aud dollars or so.
There a trades that take 4 year apprenticeships in Australia that are paid less than this or very close too.
Fast food joints shouldn’t be a place to build a career, they’re a place for students etc to work.
If you want high living wages go to school or get a trade, minimum effort jobs are not for grown adults.
Fast food joints shouldn’t be a place to build a career, they’re a place for students etc to work.
Soooo who exactly is going to serve lunch when school is in session?
Uni isnt every day 10 hours a day
Sounds like the trades are being underpaid.
What an incredibly bad and ignorant take. If you can make more money flipping burgers, trades will have no choice but to raise their wages to compete. Or, quit your job and go flip burgers if that’s a better deal.
Fast food places are so fundamental as a stepping stone to building a career and to say only children who are exploited should be working there only says you are ok exploiting children.
If someone is working to serve you your food, they deserve a living wage.
Students uni etc not children.
Ok here’s a revised paragraph for you:
Fast food places are so fundamental as a stepping stone to building a career and to say only young adults who are exploited should be working there only says you are ok exploiting young adults.
Then never in your life go to a fast food joint at 10 am on a Tuesday.
In terms of pure dollar amount, it should by adjusted by PPP. It should be a wage to live off of. I’m in engineering, a few years into my career, I am well paid but I should be paid more, relative to CoL. I should be doing very well even if I have a family not doing well because I don’t have one.
Ouch on those age numbers.
If they’re meant for students than you wouldn’t be mad if they were closed during the day would you? Since that’s when students are in school and all.
No not at all
Fast food joints shouldn’t be a place to build a career, they’re a place for students etc to work.
This is why you can’t buy fast food during school hours. Seriously, stop with this bootlicking, boomer classist bullshit myth. All work deserves dignity and a living wage. Aside from that, I will near guarantee that you apply this across the industry, you’ve just closed about 85% of restaurants and hospitality (retail, etc) as most of the people working there are not students. Also, it’s NOT easy work which is another bullshit line. It’s like that old trope about the plumber that comes out and twists one knob and the guy that called them says “you only twisted one knob! Why should I pay you $300?” and the plumber says “because I knew which knob to twist.” Fast food and this type of work is a lot like that, except we don’t pay them well enough for most to stay long enough to know which knob.
Tbh, if fast food employees were paid their worth, there is a decent chance that customer cost would go down because they’d usually be closer to max efficiency and the restaurant would spend less money on things like lawsuits and fines and such because the “manager” had more than 10 minutes of experience and training before promotion.
