President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to quickly raise the federal minimum wage and to expand labor unions' reach by eliminating secret ballot union elections.
These initiatives could combine to have a devastating impact on Louisville-based Yum! Brands, a 50,000 employee company that owns Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Consumers will probably have little patience for paying union wages for their junk food.
Assuming this happens, how long would it be before the fast food industry makes tracks to Washington D.C. to ask for a bailout of their own?
Saturday, November 8, 2008
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2 comments:
You're promoting your socialism for the wealthy again. Over the past 8 years the Bush administration engineered one of the largest transfers of wealth in this nation's history. By forcing American workers to be paid $1.00 less per hour, Republican economics was able to transfer enough wealth to the upper 5% income earners so 1% of that 5%, now control 20% of America's wealth. The 5% own about 40% of all businesses--and they're not starting new businesses with the Bush largesse to them. Trickle down failed again.
As for raising the minimum wage, it's doubtful that Yum's would need a government handout.
John R. Talbott, in his book, Obamanomics wrote:
"McDonald's has accurate figures on what percentage of a hamburger's cost is low price labor. But if you think of the cost of meat, the cost of growing the lettuce and tomatoes, the cost of shipping the raw ingredients, the cost of the building and the value of the real estate in the parking lot, it's hard to imagine that the sixty seconds of low-cost labor in each hamburger adds much to the cost of the hamburger you purchase. If sixty seconds is all it takes to assemble and sell a hamburger, and we double wages from $6.00 to $12.00, that means the minute of hard labor going into the hamburger cost us $0.10 more. If we assume there is additional low-wage labor further upstream in the meat processing, farming, or trucking effort, and all of this cost is passed on to the consumer, then the price of a hamburger might increase from $2.00 to $2.20.
"This, certainly, is much less impact on hamburger pricing than most people would have expected. Most Americans would be glad to pay 10 percent more for their hamburgers, if it meant knowing that their fellow Americans could work their way out of poverty, feed their families, pay their rent, and have enough time left at the end of the day to show their children how much they truly loved them."
What Talbott wrote about McDonald's is likely true of Yum's.
I'd remind you that it was labor unions along with the GI Bill after WWII, that made possible the middle class.
You seem not to understand that for there to be economic prosperity, money has to circulate, and it needs to be kept in circulation.
The problem with workplace balloting is that management can take punitive action against employees whom they suspect of voting union. If they're near retirement age, management can practice age discrimination and fire them under any pretext thereby reducing their "labor" costs. Neither you nor management want to acknowledge that labor creates wealth.
Unions used to be a good thing when they were needed and really used to care about the welfare of the common laborer but anymore are just corrupt money sponges that take little interest in fighting for the rights of workers. People could do a lot better on the minimum wage they've got if they all didn't think they needed a flat 52" flat screen tv and an ATV for every kid they have. If we weren't such a consumer driven country and could save up our money and wisely manage our money then we wouldn't need to increase wages. People are so lazy they just want the government to manage their money for them, feed them, clothe them, and tuck them in at night but they need to grow up. People are a lot worse off all around the world but we complain about not making more than $6 an hour.
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