Clarification: Not all Fast Food Employees are Stupid Fucking Idiots, but all of the Fast Food Employees that are staging protests, strikes, and walkouts over wages are Stupid Fucking Idiots.
I fail to understand why YOU, a person who takes words spoken by the customer and then, by either pressing buttons or following explicit instructions to create simple foods, turn that into relatively cheap and quick "food", believe that what you do is worth $15 an hour. You have a position that requires the intelligence and skill that life forms that barely register as "human" can master. Your job requires no education past post-Sesame Street level Elementary School mathematics and language (most often in the language of the country where your store is located). It requires no special knowledge of anything beyond button pressing and basic social interaction. It requires no exemplary or substantial education or employment history. Basically, if you can manage to get to the building and say, "Job Application?", you are probably qualified.
So, when you piss and moan about how little you get paid, it makes me want to shove your head in the hot oil reservoir.
"But we deserve a living wage!" you scream.
"Then learn a fucking skill that sets you apart from chimpanzees and Jersey Shore residents," I retort.
I have a fucking master's degree, nearly 20 years in customer service, and an IQ in the top 2%. I make $10 an hour. Why? Because of fairly simple economic concepts. I have a degree in a field that is currently over saturated. That means that thanks to several different reasons, there are more people looking for the same jobs than there are available jobs.
Your situation is similar but not identical. Whereas my field requires a certain level of education and experience, which currently, there is an overabundance of supply, your field requires nothing. So, while there are jobs available that are not quickly filled (unlike my field), the supply of potential workers is vastly larger than in my field. Additionally, since your positions are easy to replace (i.e. replacing a worker with a new worker results in little prolonged service quality decrease), there is less of a downside to filtering through multiple employees until one that is willing to do an adequate job at the wage offered can be found.
Additionally, your wage is one of many factors that determine the profit margin of the company for which you work. That company is there to make money for the individuals that own and operate the company. They are not there solely to provide you with employment. You are a means to an end, a resource used by the owners to achieve their goal of making money. Their job is to maintain a company that is profitable so that they earn money with which to buy shit. Your job is whatever they need you to do in order for the company to make money and be profitable so that the owners can then give you some of their money in return. If at some point, the business is no longer profitable enough to keep the owner interested in continuing the operation, then in all likelihood, your job goes away. That's how this works. There is no altruistic goal by the people giving you money to press buttons in the same way that you aren't handing people poorly constructed sandwiches in an effort to bring peace and harmony to the people of Earth. You do it to make money to buy shit.
The fact that you don't seem to grasp basic economic principles only further highlights that you are not worth the exorbitant wage level of which you deem yourself deserving.
Now... let's just say that you got your wish and your position started earning $15 an hour? What makes you think that you wouldn't be replaced by somebody similar to me... a skilled, experienced laborer that makes less than $15? Why would your employer, if they had the choice between somebody with maybe a high school diploma and no experience outside of low wage unskilled labor jobs and someone with years of experience and education and more perceived potential to become a valuable asset to the company instead of just somebody that might make shift manager, choose basic over deluxe?
And make no mistake... if I could make 50% more than I make now to do your job, a job that requires almost no significant responsibility, why wouldn't I? And be honest... which one of us is going to be more attractive to your boss?
See, when they pay you $8 an hour, they don't expect much. They are generally pretty satisfied if you show up and not steal from the till. But if you ratchet that up to almost twice the pay, shit is gonna get real. And do you know why? Because if I'm paying you $15 an hour, I'm expecting you do do a fabulous job. And if you aren't impressing me, there is damn sure gonna be somebody out there that can put your "skills" to shame and I'd bet they would do your job better for, say, $14 an hour. Don't believe me? Yeah, see, that's why you are stupid.
Nobody OWES you a "living wage." It's not a human right (as I've already discussed) and you are not entitled to it. Regardless of what your bleeding heart liberal hippie heroes have led you to believe, a classless utopia is impossible. There will always be rich people and poor people (and all those in between). You can try and create a classless society, but it won't last because there will always be some people that either want more than you (and are more inclined to exert the level of effort to obtain it) or just naturally acquire more than you (example: only one farmer grows corn in your society and he has a bad crop and so there isn't enough for everybody. Even if there is a lottery system and no goods/services are exchanged for corn, there will be some people with corn (haves) and some without corn (have nots))
So, here's what I have to say in summary: It's a cruel world, not everybody gets a trophy. Fuck off.
