Dunkin' CEO makes $10 million a year but $15 minimum wage is "absolutely outrageous"

boing
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while many poor people do live in rural areas, the urban working class is not able to make ends meet. except for people in tech, almost everyone i know is working two jobs to make ends meet. and those sorts of anecdotes are borne out by current statistics.

no. this seems to be an uncritical political stance showing through. “obama care” has only just started, and it’s not a disaster.

many more people have insurance, and that insurance is more meaningful than it was. both of those are good things.

socialized healthcare would still be best. countries with such healthcare have better health outcomes at lower cost than the us does. time will have to tell how the aca does.

re: tort. my admittedly not-well researched position is that tort reform is a red herring.

one driver of legal costs is the fact people aren’t well insured. insurance companies sue because no one wants to pay. fix insurance, and it seems tort would follow. if not, then after fixing insurance – address the remaining issues.

yes! bringing down the cost of medical education, getting people – doctors, et al – out of the debt cycle would indeed help a lot.

only those i know who are salaried in tech are in this boat. ( though, i’m sure this extends to other professionals as well. )

most of my working class friends haven’t previously been able to afford insurance. while most self-employed tech friends have only had catastrophe insurance.

overall, i really do think the best thing we can do is enact steep progressive taxation and roll the gains back into alleviating the basic costs of living – avoid subsidies, tax breaks, and the like: instead focus on shifting the burden of shared infrastructure ( health, education, transport, … ) from lower income earners to higher income earners.

ideally, every low income earner would have the opportunity to become a high(er) income earner. right now, that’s not the case. and we have a huge issue coming for when people in their 30s and 40s now reach “retirement”. currently, it seems they’ll be working till they are dead.

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I work an hourly rate in tech (HellDesk), but have very good insurance. The deductible shocked me (I turned 25 last September, and just started paying my own insurance for the first time), but the coverage is good, pays for my meds which ironically are the only reason my brain works well enough to hold a job in the first place. Also the dental plan is stellar. I pay nothing to go in four times a year for checkups and cleaning.

Aaaaaanyway, I’m a bit of a special case, because my company specifically has a big focus on having a high human development index for its employees. Also, they know that even a lowly HellDesk pleb like me has access and permissions necessary to destroy their whole network, therefore preventing them from making any money, so it’s prudent to keep the likes of me and my colleagues happy and feeling like we’re being treated fairly.

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I still work in healthcare and have worked in the public systems in the UK, Oz and NZ as well as doing a little detour to the 3rd world for a bit. Go have a look at the population health stats for countries which have decent public healthcare provision and compare them to where the USA sits in the rankings.

Hint: it sucks.

You live in the only developed nation with a rising maternal mortality rate. And you spend twice as much as OECD average on health to get to be that bad. That’s all down to the fragmented mess of competing businesses each with their noses in the trough.

Your government is indeed not clever. If it were you’d already have a single payer system …

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Actually, we have two national single payer systems: Medicare (for old people) and Medicaid (for poor people). We also have a full-bore state run socialized medicine, namely the Veterans Administration. They’re just not universal. Probably because that’d be “a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.”*

*actual quote of Ronald Reagan in opposition to Medicare

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Thinking that privatised healthcare makes for more cost effective healthcare is where you part company with reality and over a century of evidence based medicine.

Health insurance rather than universal health cover is the scam.

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In other words, it seems that the business model itself is unethical in that the franchise agreements are structured so as to rely on the franchisees paying wages lower than the cost of living if they expect to make a profit (and why else run a franchise?)

But in any case, if what you say is true, the correct action for franchisees is not to double down on shitty wages, it’s to pressure the parent corporation to deal more fairly with the franchisees themselves, or not to enter into such low-margin agreements in the first place.

Besides all of that, while staffing may be a retailer’s largest single expense, that does not necessarily mean that a wage increase–even a dramatic one–must result in a large increase in retail pricing.

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Man. So we have a guy who has no actual idea of what the world is like, openly rejecting factual sources while refusing to provide any of his own, all in defense of larger companies using employees like slaves

And he doesn’t even know how to use paragraphs.

I’m one of these 'professionals" making $15/hr. I’m a chemical engineer with a 4-year degree and 3 years of experience who’s given $15/hour, no paid time off for holidays or sick days, no worthwhile benefits at all, and I will never be given a raise. The previous three people to hold my position all had Master’s degrees. My job is labor intensive and routinely has me handling dangerous chemicals that at any time I could become sensitized to and get me fired due to being unable to continue to do my work duties. And the company can get away with paying so little because there are no other options. The problem isn’t that McDonalds workers would be paid too much at $15/hour, it’s that companies are outright abusing employees who have no choices if they don’t want to fucking STARVE to death. Unpaid internships and the like (which DON’T lead to jobs) just prove how out-and-out evil and abusive companies have become.

A $15 minimum wage would help drive up the wages of other jobs, which is what desperately needs to be done. But honestly, it isn’t even enough, and we need a minimum income in this country. Everyone is deserving of a living wage. Period, end of story. To suggest otherwise is to openly argue that some people just deserve to starve to death.

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But the short of it really is anyone who thinks McDonalds jobs are “for teenagers” or “meant to be stepping stones” and that “people can just find better jobs” isn’t just clueless at this point - they are willfully lying, ignoring facts and evidence to push a political philosophy that causes nothing but suffering and misery.

These people have to KNOW what they are saying is outright false. They don’t care. They don’t care because they want people they view as inferior to them to suffer. That’s why they’re willing to outright dismiss facts and evidence and anyone who actually has to live in this economy and deal with it.

Because they’re fucking heartless and evil.

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yup you bring the hot sauce ill bring the slaw,mmm ribs.

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Dunkin’ corporate may control the cost of goods sold, but the franchisees determine the revenue.

All Dunkin’ Donuts stores are owned and operated by independent franchisees who have the flexibility to set their own prices for beverages and other products.

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Just in case someone reading this lives in an area where $30k is a nice living, which there are many places like that - New York is not one of those places.

The starting prices of homes in this area is about $300,000. At one point I was looking to see if there were some cheap apartments around here, trying to see if it were possible for my dad to move up here, and to rent a room in someone’s house - which is about the cheapest way to go - is starting at $500/month. In my area, near a university, it’s common for people to rent out basement apartments which are horrible and are not legal, for about $1000/month.

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This.

If you adjust $15 for inflation, it equates to roughly $3.75 per hour in mid-70s dollars. So raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour is merely getting us back to where we were FORTY YEARS AGO.

Where did all the economic growth and gains in efficiency over the last 40 years go? Oh, wait…

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You don’t like people becoming “wards of the government?” Just imagine how many people wouldn’t be dependent on welfare, food stamps, and government-provided health care if employers had to pay a living wage.

Keeping wages this low is the OPPOSITE of keeping people from becoming wards of the government. Look at Wal-Mart: they have more employees dependent on food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing than any other company in the country.

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If you are talking about the US here you really need to read up on how “Welfare” works. The name of the current program is a clue: Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).

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In the corporate business model 100+%* of the profits go to the owners/investors. Any fines and taxes are paid by the customer and employees. In this model the employees (wage slave) is nothing more than a piece of rental equipment. Wages are not profit but how much you have been coerced to auction the rent of yourself against the price of the guy working next to you.

You are just a cost of operation, actual slaves were more of a business investment than the employee is,

There is no balance to be found in it, it is constant struggle and class warfare. It is by design. Politicians supporting this business models are either fetishizing it(conservatives) or applying bandaids to it(liberals) to keep the ball rolling down the road.

The only real alternative is a government that can’t ethically support any business model that is not an employee- owned cooperative.

*(that + being perks from the government, paid by actual working people)

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Let them eat cake, right?

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[quote=“dragonchild12, post:109, topic:62522”]
But the short of it really is anyone who thinks McDonalds jobs are “for teenagers” or “meant to be stepping stones” … they are willfully lying, ignoring facts [/quote]

True dat. All you have to do is… Go in one. I understand the economics must be balanced, but as Gob from Arrested Development says, Come on!

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Depends on your definition of “hard”, actually. Sure, writing quality, bugfree software is intellectually demanding, and a specialized skill that takes years to master (I’m married to a programmer, so I know)… but manual labor can be physically demanding and in some cases gross. Nor is it considered important and valued in our society, despite the fact that they are necessary to the smooth functioning of our social structures. That’s the thing they ignore… Interesting thing is that I see similar things in academia, too. You’d think they’d be completely different mindsets… but some academics (it tends to be men, but not always…) think that what they do is so important, so critical (and yes, as an academic, I agree the production of knowledge matters and should be valued in our society and it’s important), and that what they do matters so much, that they can look down on everyone else in academia - especially the people who do the actual work in the departments (they are the ones who help grad students and undergrads, teach survey courses, do tons of committee work, sometimes at the expense of their own publishing/writing goals, etc)… Probably a function of a system of tenure which is increasingly rare. The people who now have it feel as if they are special enough and have earned it solely via intellect and hard work, rather than a combination of talent, luck, and right place/right time (prior to 2008 or so).

Yeah. I have. There is an unfortunately problem of many (mostly white), elite feminists ignoring the majority of women in the work force and their struggles to make ends meet. They suck at intersectionality, in other words.

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Gah, and you know what sticks in my craw the most? Increasing the minimum wage will increase monetary velocity and acceleration. Which makes poor people and rich people more money!

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And also a sign of those executives being some of the only ones able to pick that battle.

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