Six hundred eighty-nine thousand views, six thousand four hundred ‘likes’, almost 500 quotes & reposts: A self-promoting lie can run around the internet world…
What's particularly hilarious about this vibesession story is that the delivery markup price is, essentially, the McDonald's consumer hiring a low-wage gig worker so they don't have to leave the house. This complaint boils down to "the economy is bad bc the help costs too much" https://t.co/nlmYgiJ31Y
— David Watkins (@djw172) December 3, 2023
Fast food restaurant staff making $20 per hour is actually evidence of a strong economy, but if you’re making $25 an hour in a job you consider to be massively higher status than flipping burgers, you think it is bad
— Daniel Knowles (@dlknowles) December 1, 2023
All of which reminded me of this essay from Hamilton Nolan — The Cannibal South: An inferiority complex-ridden region depends on eating its own :
… Since the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, more than two million people have migrated to the six fastest growing states in the South, bringing with them $100 billion in new income. This population shift is held up by Southern governors as proof of the success of their policies—and as a herald of an ongoing shift in the balance of economic power that is bound to continue due to the South’s inherent advantages. What spurred this grand relocation? Traditional wisdom will tell you that it was the more relaxed and open posture of Southern states like Florida during the Covid pandemic, along with the perpetual allures of warmer weather, lower taxes, and more affordable housing prices.
In reality, though, this current sloshing of America towards its drain is not the start of anything new at all. It is spurred not by any new economic paradigm, nor by any Texan or Floridian governor’s new ideas about unleashing the power of free enterprise under the nation’s sunniest skies. It is, instead, a normal reaction to a temporary rise in the appeal of something that the South has been offering for more than 200 years. Politicians will tell you that the South is attractive because it offers greater freedom. Actually, it offers cannibalism: it is willing to kill and eat its own to fuel a marginal improvement in your lifestyle. Don’t let this deal pass you by!
Ron Desantis is running (unsuccessfully) for president on the premise that he can do for America what he has done for Florida in the past three years. One way to look at his record during those crucial Covid years is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions, which caused the Florida economy to flourish. Another, more accurate way to look at it is: he kept stuff open and got rid of pandemic restrictions because he fundamentally does not care whether his citizens live or die, as long as his state could get a temporary economic boost that he could use for self-promotional purposes. In this, Desantis was the perfect combination of the classic Southern socioeconomic strategy with a global pandemic. Ever since being forced to give up formal slavery at gunpoint, the South has pursued a formula of attraction only one step removed from it. The region’s offer to businesses and wealthy people in the rest of America is, and has always been, this: “Come to the South. Do whatever you want. We won’t regulate you. We won’t tax you. We’ll crush any unions that dare to come here. We’ll provide a pool of dirt-cheap labor for you. Because we don’t tax you, our public services will be awful. Our public schools will be inadequate. But don’t worry, because we will build graceful private schools for the people with money, and we will build private country clubs and gated communities to shield you from the poverty, and racist cops to police the borders of the neighborhoods, and you can live here in a private island of bliss. The inadequacy of our public services and our outright racial oppression guarantee that that cheap labor force will continue forever. You can profit from that cheap labor force without ever having to interact with the people who compose it, except as various forms of servants. The oppression, sequestered away from you and walled off from impacting your life except to enhance it, is what makes the system work.”
That’s it. That’s the South’s sales pitch. It is the poorest and most backwards region of America by traditional socioeconomic measurements, but it’s great place to be when you exclude all of the poor people from your measurements. Which they do, because “not caring about all the poor people” is the key to the South’s ability to imagine itself as a place with a political system that works. This is the slavery mentality dragged cleanly into the present day, modified just enough to fit the letter of the law. In the plantation era, the South was great, as long as you were a plantation owner. If you add all the slaves (and poor whites) into the calculation… ugh, you mess up the numbers. Despite the fact that the South’s failure to industrialize properly due to slavery was one of the things that lost it the Civil War, the region remains stubbornly addicted to cheap labor today. It is, at heart, an inferiority complex. The South’s leaders don’t really believe that they have anything to offer to lure people in other than a work force that will show up for rock bottom wages. If the South really believed in itself, it would be busily investing in public education and health care and a strong social safety net and all the other things that build a healthy and thriving society that ultimately attracts people and businesses. Instead, they do the opposite—because empowering the existing residents of the South would undermine its cheap labor pool…
Or, to quote Jen Rubin at the Washington Post on a blog-favorite historian:
… In 2021, historian Heather Cox Richardson located the roots of the mythology in the days of Reconstruction “when white southerners insisted that federal efforts to enable formerly enslaved men to participate in the economy on terms equal to white men were simply a redistribution of wealth, because the agents and policies required to achieve equality would cost tax dollars.” Labeling any effort to deprive Whites of absolute power and riches built on slavery as “socialism,” the anti-government conservative movement forged in the Gilded Age tried but largely failed to dislodge the New Deal.
“The myth of the cowboy — the individualist — was a kind of cover for the attitudes that favored large employers, including mining, railroad, financial and ranching interests,” Knute Berger wrote in 2021 for PBS’s Crosscut, expounding on Richardson’s work. “The bosses discouraged workers from unionizing or acting collectively. To the oligarchs East and West, North and South, the idea of the unrestrained individualism of the cowboy, devoid of responsibility for others, suited a divide-and-conquer strategy very well.”
And yet the movement found new strength in the past 50 years: “They called themselves Movement Conservatives, and they celebrated the cowboy who, in their inaccurate vision, was a hardworking white man who wanted nothing of the government but to be left alone to work out his own future,” Richardson wrote. President Barack Obama in challenging the myth (“You didn’t build that”) attempted to remind these characters that they’ve reaped the benefits of government (which builds the infrastructure, educates the workforce, ensures public confidence in medicines, etc.); for that he was demonized as somehow un-American and anti-capitalist. The episode underscored the degree to which American oligarchs and their political surrogates depend on delusion and denial….
That Obama fella! Hisssss!!!!….
Lends some support for this theory https://t.co/d8gKLOYfKi pic.twitter.com/Ek7EsLEIPl
— James Medlock (@jdcmedlock) December 3, 2023
This is correct – and the reason white-collar middle-class Twitter people get so angry when you point it out is the cognitive dissonance between their nominal leftism and the fact that they feel this way https://t.co/wRW8RAA7QE
— John B (@johnb78) December 2, 2023
no one wants to be a subsistence farmer. the lifestyle these people romanticize, even those of of them that are theoretically left wing, is of a rural petty aristocrat. you “live off the land” but the bulk of the actual terrible work of agriculture happens just off screen. https://t.co/bilFxmj6X3
— William B. Fuckley (@opinonhaver) August 28, 2023
War for Ukraine Day 649: The Disappeared
FelonyGovt
Yes, there seems to be lots of resentment that fast food workers, hotel maids etc. are making more money, even though it’s needed to make it a living wage here in California and other high-cost, housing-scarce places.
All those poor bruised egos, butthurt that the “lower classes” are making not as much less than they are.
Martin
In-N-Out near me pays $21/hr with health benefits. You can get a cheeseburger meal with fries and a drink for $7.50.
Maybe the problem is McDonalds is just greedy.
And you think the $7.25 minimum wage in the south is bad, check out the minimum wage for tipping jobs: $2.13.
CA/OR/WA it’s $13.50 – $15.50.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishments☘🌈 Koch
Freedom fries aren’t free!
Alison Rose
@FelonyGovt: $15.50 isn’t even a living wage in most of CA. In my county, for a single adult with no kids, it’s currently $21.14. And that’s honestly barely enough if you want to live in anything above shithole-level.
John Revolta
Not long ago a study showed that FOX viewers knew less about the actual state of the country than people who watched no news at all. Well, all the MSM news sources are now essentially FOX. So here we are.
Mike in Pasadena
Didn’t we have a month ago some right winger twitter/X-bitching about the cost of an airport burger? Turns out he included the cost of alcoholic beverages? Maybe I read that somewhere else.
Martin
@Alison Rose: Honestly that gap hasn’t been this small in quite a while. And if we could address the housing side of the problem with increased development, especially missing middle housing, it’d close that up pretty quick. Fix rents, and you fix most of the remaining problems.
Citizen Alan
@Martin:
Probably. But here the problem is also that the author of the tweet that started it was quoting the cost of having McDonald’s fries delivered to his house!
Jay
@Martin:
The OP poster, Lewis (who paid $8 to Felon Husk for a blue check) was just lying his ass off about the cost, just like “Brooksie’s” airport meal. Going for the rage clicks.
Martin
@Mike in Pasadena: That was David Fucking Brooks.
Gretchen
@Mike in Pasadena: yes, that was David Brooks complaining about an $80 tab for a burger at the airport. Turned out there were also several double whiskies on the tab. Oops!
Anne Laurie
That wasn’t just ‘some right winger’, it was the Very Respectable Applebee’s Salad Bar Inspector David Brooks!
… Who claimed, once he was outed by his own tweeted receipt, that he meant it as ‘a joke’.
But, yeah, BoBo Brooks is one of the premier Thought Leaders for this kind of Alas, the proles are now revolting babble. Lackwits like the $7 fries memester *aspire* to be Brooks!
Jay
@Gretchen:
And not just several double whisky’s, top shelf stuff.
Jay
Btw, those fries are $3.99 in Canada, with out delivery, and our minimum wage here is $16.75 and there is no such thing as a “tipping wage”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/oct/16/waffle-house-workers-strike-minimum-wage-union
They want $25, not as minimum wage, but as danger pay.
John Revolta
@Gretchen: Perfeckly unnerstann’ble mistake. Coulda happenn’ annybody. Take careofit innamornnin’. Hey, you here *hic* byer self?
BeautifulPlumage
I think another issue with the rising wages for “entry level” jobs is that more senior positions also want more money to separate, so wages up the chain have to rise (as FelonyGovt points out in comment #1).
raven
@Martin: How much are the shirts these days?
raven
Damn spinal injection, I can’t even sleep!
Jay
@BeautifulPlumage:
So CEO’s will now get 5,500% times what their median employee’s now get, (instead of the mere 3,800% they get now),
plus more stock options and bonus’s for just barely doing their jobs?
It will trickle down,………………… to politicians, Supreme Court Judges and PAC’s.
Aussie Sheila
@Martin:
The ‘tipping wage’ gives the whole game away. It is the perfect combination of economic coercion and concomitant social deference that gives ‘conservatism’ precisely the frisson that is so enjoyed by conservatives.
It is a disgusting idea and I have no idea why it is allowed to persist. I first came across it when I was in the US in the early ‘90s. I couldn’t believe that such coercive and forced social deference could exist in the ‘greatest democracy in the world’. Not.
What an absolute disgrace it still persists. This would indeed be ‘exceptional’ in any advanced industrial economy in the world.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
BTW, here, we tip, but there is no “tipping wage”.
It’s considered to be at a minimum, 15% of the bill.
Tips are pooled and split to all wage staff other than Managers.
NotMax
“Our forebears had slaves, why can’t we?”
//
Kathleen
@Mike in Pasadena: David Brooks from NYT.
Redshift
I think there’s something to this. I remember reading that one of the pernicious things about rising inequality is how it affects everybody – rich people are pulling further away from middle class people, but rich people looking at the super-rich above them see them pulling away, which makes it seem like they’re doing worse, since they aspire to reach that level.
The Biden economy has been better for those near the bottom than any sign be before Reagan, which is great. But since the GOP blocked you from soaking the rich, the middle class still sees inequality increasing above them. Hmmm.
Jay
@NotMax:
you can’t afford them, and the laws won’t for the most part allow them,
best we can give you is serfs.
Martin
NotMax
@Jay
Peonage is the new black.
//
Martin
@raven: $16
Danielx
@Mike in Pasadena:
Some Villager doucherocket, if I recall.
Jay
@Martin:
And for that $3, you have to go to work during natural disasters, endure violent drunks, murders, robberies, YouTube wannabe’s and of course, plagues.
Aussie Sheila
@Jay:
I don’t know where your ‘here’ is.
I do know that I was introduced to the concept in the US in 1992.
Even I, who knew a fair bit about US Labor law and conditions, was shocked.
In Australia tipping is becoming more common, but is still thought of as being something you do when the service is outstanding . It’s not a generally accepted thing for the usual working or middle class outing or meal.
The adult minimum wage here is $A23.23 per hr, or $A45,905 odd per annum. Housing costs in the two big cities here are insane, but health care is universal and no one goes broke because they have cancer.
Martin
@Aussie Sheila: It was most popularized by the Pullman Company who were hiring recently freed slaves to work as porters for wage + tips, with the understanding that white passengers would tip the white porters but not the black ones. I believe that was the influence to for the federal model.
Nothing has changed – at least federally.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
Here is Canada, BC to be specific.
If you get service, 15% is customary, if you get great service, it’s higher than that. Only if you get shitty service, do you not tip, and ideally, talk to a Manager.
Our minimum wage was just recently raised, but has not kept pace with inflation. Living wage here is now $25.04 for two full time wage earners.
And yes, we have Universal Heathcare, when you can get it, (Medical staff shortages, wait times), and are soon to get Universal Dental.
Here in Vancouver, we have an online game, “Crack House or Mansion”, in which you guess if the multi-million dollar property listed for sale, off it’s description is a tear down crack house or a 5 bedroom McMansion. You don’t win anything, other than photo’s at the end.
Aussie Sheila
@Martin:That figures. The influence of slavery on the status of the US working class is clear to outsiders. Internally not so much.
The struggle against racism is always a working class issue, but in the US it is an existential issue going straight at the heart of US liberalism. Which is why US liberalism has so often failed to get a grip. Liberalism uninflected by working class power is not much more than a form of ‘politess’ designed to ensure forms meet approval while ignoring substantive issues of social equality.
Baud
Lotta words just to say “propaganda.”
Martin
I should probably give my take on why In N Out is cheap. It’s not franchised. McDonalds is mostly a real estate business with leverage. In most cases, the corporation owns the land the restaurant is on, and the franchisee pays rent, and they still get the licensing and purchase of materials from the franchisee.
In N Out makes their money selling the food. None of them are franchised. They run a relatively tight ship. Their corporate headquarters is near where I live, and I think it’s now up to 3 floors of an office building. The best In N Out in the country is the one across the parking lot. Super busy because it’s next to the university but every day someone delivers lunch to the corporate office from there (the elevator always smells like In N Out) – so it’s always good.
But I think all franchise businesses are getting really greedy because it’s pretty clear investors are having their moment and they’re squeezing for profits. In-N-Out also isn’t publicly traded.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud: Really? You think criticism of US liberalism as being more form over substance is ‘propaganda’ because something, something the U.S. is the ‘oldest and greatest democracy in the world’?
You need to travel more. Better still, get a minimum wage job in Arkansas and then get back to me about the glories of US federalism and the benefits of ‘local’ arrangements focussed on wages and voting rights.
Get a grip.
Jay
@Aussie Sheila:
I think that Baud was dismissing the tweet starting the thread as “just propaganda”,
thus the “lotta words”,
which it is, but it’s designed to serve many agenda’s which we should know about and be aware of.
Baud
@Jay:
Correct.
@Aussie Sheila:
You get a grip.
Jay
@Martin:
SWMBO’s best friend had to take a job at In an Out when things got tight, not long ago. She loved it, and over her 50 years plus of working, both high and low, she said the experience of being a Manager there was amongst the best she has ever had.
BeautifulPlumage
@Jay: yup. All wages go up, but the higher you are the bigger the %.
Jay
@Baud:
You need to add some words to not have your comments taken the wrong way in a thread, or tag whom you are replying to.
Otherwise, people can take your comments the wrong way.
In the thread, it appears as if you are responding to Aussie Shelia, if you are just scanning the thread and don’t know Baud 2028.
Baud
@Jay:
If I were responding to her, I would have @’d her, the way I did you.
Kirk
So basically, “Dammit, those people are getting sparrows and curtain rods.”
Jay
@BeautifulPlumage:
Back in the 50’s and 60’s, a CEO made on average, 34% more than what the median employee made,
Last year, on average, they made 3800%, not including stock options and bonus’s.
Basically, it CEO pay were cranked back to the 50’s and 60’s rate, a Corp could triple their workforce at a living wage, or quintuple their dividends to stock holders.
I would humbly suggest, given much of the current crop of CEO’s, that one could take a random unhoused person off the street, clean them up, give them a manicure and some appropriate hair products, dress them in a power suit and strap on a Rolex, and the Corp would have better results.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud: Whatevs. You aren’t always as funny as you and your fans think. But you can always be relied on to get huffy when anyone points that out. BTW, my grip is excellent. A lifetime of lifting weights pays off. You should try it.
Jay
@Baud:
I know, but then I know Baud! 2028.*
Sometimes, more so on late night Balloon Juice After Dark, we need to be extra clear.
*you can’t use the exclamation point in your campaign, I have already registered it, and started a PAC.
Ksmiami
I can’t even imagine being so lazy and unrefined that I would actually order McDonalds delivery… Jfc
Baud
@Aussie Sheila:
Oh no!
You’re the one who made an error and hasn’t apologized for it. But I respect that you’re Australian and your culture may be different from mine.
Brachiator
Most people don’t care about this, at least not directly. However, they may feel anger if they believe that increased wages and inflation have caused the price of the goods they buy to increase.
Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich regularly posts little snippets on YouTube suggesting that corporate profits are responsible for price increases.
Another example.
R eich also has a good short video that deals with these issues.
ETA. It’s wild that some conservatives like to complain about “lazy” poor people not working, but then also complain if lower income workers get pay increases.
Jay
@Ksmiami:
Here, we have had one food delivery, in 4 years, Gino’s, a pizza, ( it’s worth it). Gino’s then because of costs, dropped their in house delivery radius, (who got paid well), so we can’t do that anymore with out engaging a gig service, (that pays crap) so instead, I’ll take the bus or drive. It’s not far.
Mickey D’s is less than a block away. I would never order “just fries”, tells you that the Xshitter was stoned out of their minds while playing video games or just rage farming.
And I can make a much better, cheaper burger and oven fries at home in less time than an order and delivery would take.
Betty Cracker
Fans of the late Pogues front man Shane MacGowan should go read this elegiac write-up in The Atlantic right now.
Truth.
Ksmiami
@Jay: exactly- the idea that the economic indicators of America is a delivered fast food meal is just ridiculous.
Brachiator
@Martin:
This is not correct. From one history of the porters.
There were strikes to get honest pay and to eliminate social indignities.
There were very few, if any white porters. Some passengers, especially Southerners, preferred light skin blacks as their porters.
PBK
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for this link, Betty. He was truly a poet of squalor and empathy.
raven
@Martin: Whoa!
sab
I have known a lot of people who worked at McDonalds all over the country. A job at one of their company stores could be life changing. Training, opportunities, all that. A job at one of their franchises, on the the other hand, was just a sucky low wage job at a generic franchise.
Jay
@Brachiator:
https://www.cranbrookhistorycentre.com/how-the-black-sleeping-car-porters-shaped-canada/#:~:text=Historically%2C%20porters%20were%20exclusively%20Black,gained%20popularity%20with%20railway%20companies
https://www.rcinet.ca/bhm-en/2019/02/04/the-story-of-the-black-porters-on-canadian-railways/
Now you know where Oscar Peterson’s “Night Train” comes from.
satby
@Baud: I called that one out a few weeks ago or so for basically being a troll without saying the T word. Pretty much shows up just to call us all deplorables.
sab
@satby: She is older than me and she still hasn’t figured us out, and she thinks Australia is some sort of beacon of racial harmony and good government. (Murdochs all hatched there.)
They were banning Chinese immigration well into my adult life.
satby
Heather Cox Richardson’s post
today(last night):Baud
@satby:
I figured that out when she said I wasn’t funny. I’m hilarious!
Gvg
The tips versus wage issue here is tricky. You have to realize tips are supposed to be reported for taxes but rarely are. They are under the table income for many and when you are really low income that little margin seems big. However that means they aren’t paying into their own social security or unemployment insurance which hurts them in the long run. Their employer also isn’t paying full load if they don’t make an effort to know and report the full income, and at least small business restaurant owners I saw were always a bit crooked.
Lately the fast food bills have suddenly started having automatic add ons of tips. This is new. Places like Moes or The Burger Guys never had tips before. You go to a counter to pay, get the food and walk out. I don’t get why that’s suddenly tip service and I don’t like it. They should stick to wage increases and official income. I have worked for tips. It’s a bad idea. But the taxes and peoples attitudes complicate getting rid of it. I think in some areas and jobs it can also be covering illegal immigration too but I don’t know about that. Any way to be paid under the table, non salary tends to be connected to that some though.
sab
@Baud: You are!
satby
@Baud: of course you are. And so say all of us 😘
satby
@sab: agree, there’s plenty of inequity in Australia to focus on. In any country, really. Not that the USA isn’t deserving of criticism, but the country isn’t a monolith and to parachute into a discussion about the roots of the worst of our most stubborn issues to post their standard denunciation without even a nod to the OP is par for the course.
Jay
@Gvg:
And because tips arn’t “regulated”, a bunch of Mgrs and Corp dip into the tip pool.
Just another form of wage theft.
Jay
@Gvg:
Because most transactions are now digital, rather than cash, adding a tip feature to the digital transaction, allows for tips.
Back when that feature wasn’t offered, I would have to go to an ATM and with draw cash, for tipping.
Of course, with the tip now being digital, where does it go?
The CEO’s yacht fund?, or the staff?
Princess
Probably a dead thread but: This post explains why those on here who assume the anti-abortion people only want white babies are wrong. They want Black and brown babies too — they want desperate people who will be cheap servants.
Jay
@Princess:
Yup.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve been fascinated by the tension between the xenophobic/ethnic-cleansing wing of the Republican party and the people who want and need cheap servants, because of course immigration (especially undocumented immigration) is one way to get cheap workers.
For a long time it was mostly theater: there wasn’t really tension because they wouldn’t ever crack down hard enough to really hurt the cheap labor pool. They’d just use the perilous status of these people as a way to exploit them, and the railing against “illegals” was just a way to keep the heat up. It was important that they remain “illegal”, despised and in danger of deportation because that kept them cheap.
But it seems like under Trump the true believers were in control and they actually started rounding these people up en masse and destroying that labor pool. And farmers suffered.
Of course, under my preferred approach they’d suffer too because the immigrants would be let in legitimately, be on a path to citizenship and they wouldn’t be quite so cheap. But that’s in the same category as a magic pony.
Brachiator
@Jay:
Cool info. I knew about much of this, but the LINKS are great for other folk.
I didn’t know that Peterson had dedicated the album to his father. But I think that the song “Night Train” was originally by Jimmy Forrest.
Soprano2
@Gvg: Most tips are given on credit cards now, and are easy to report, and are usually reported. Although after my last manager left we discovered that one server was stealing to the tune of $1,000+ a month by voiding cash tickets and keeping all that money plus making good tips. My former manager wasn’t keeping tabs on this at all, which is easy now with POS systems. It’s not always the owner who is a thief. I have NEVER taken one penny of tips from any employee, and never will.
Jay
@Soprano2:
I worked retail at the Orange, thru Covid,
Could not take a tip, could not accept a free coffee, could not get a coffee, (Covid, they shut the machine down), had to have 3 thermos,
and every “void” had to be approved by a Manager or Assman.
50% of the time, no lunch, because there was no coverage.
Wage theft in the US is estimated at $50 billion a year
From what you have said, I know you are good, but there are no shortage of dirtbags out there.
Marmot
The main article above is frustrating for a few reasons, but the main one is this:
Public education in Texas is generally pretty good. But we are—right now—in a major fight against Gov. Abbott’s school voucher scam, which will drain money from everyone except the rich, reduce the quality of education, and hasten the decline of small towns and cities.
So far, Dems and many small-town Repubs have fended off vouchers—what three times? Four? But Abbott is now refusing to allow a bill to raise teacher salaries, which now seriously lag, unless it includes vouchers.
Edit: So Abbott is choking public education in order to ensure he can bleed it long-term
Marmot
Other than that, the article is an extremely prolix way to say something very simple.
It spends those extra words to feed the need to sniff at a whole region, which definitely suffers the problems described, while ignoring that those problems are not at all limited to the South—they’re the active policy of a particularly rapacious political party.
Did no one see that map but me? Where the fuck is Idaho? Next to Alabama? Pennsylvania?
Raoul Paste
A perfect description of the economy of the south
Matt McIrvin
…Note also, while slavers and segregationists were willing to kill Black people in whatever numbers it took to maintain white supremacy, ultimately they didn’t want to eliminate them entirely because the main intent was for them to be slaves. (Famously, the difference between Northern and Southern racism–the Northern kind could actually be more eliminationist.)
I’ve wondered lately if that limit is eroding now… except… this is also the dynamic underlying right-wing misogyny. Women are a marginalized class they can’t just exterminate because the point is for women to be slave labor or prizes.
Matt McIrvin
@Marmot: Also, Florida’s minimum wage is actually higher than its neighbors’, and, unsurprisingly to me, New Hampshire is one of the states at the hard minimum (as is Pennsylvania). So there’s some complexity there.
Matt McIrvin
…Florida is an interesting case actually: there’s a lot of evidence from referenda and such that its population’s policy preferences are still not as reactionary as its neighbors’, but for a while there, DeSantis got political mileage out of being the most extreme of the extreme, and it’s really flipped the state’s reputation. Ten years ago I would not have thought of Florida as being a more benighted section of Dixie than Georgia, except for maybe the Panhandle.
Soprano2
@Jay: I was mostly responding to the idea that most tips are “under the table” income, because now they mostly aren’t. Since they’re put on credit cards it’s a lot easier for the IRS to discover them if you aren’t reporting them, so as far as I know most restaurants and bars report tips on credit cards as wages. That helps the employer, too, because if a tipped employee doesn’t earn at least the minimum wage in tips the employer has to pay the difference. When most tips were cash they were “under the table” income and rarely reported. Plus I don’t like the implication that most restaurant owners are crooked. I wanted to point out that some of us are being ripped off by employees. Wage theft is a bad thing, but so is employee theft. I’ve read that theft by retail employees is greater than the amount of shoplifting by customers. It seems to cut both ways – employers don’t compensate people enough, so they feel entitled to steal from the employer, which makes things even worse.
teezyskeezy
I picture living exactly like the serfs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, bringing in the filth harvest. There’s some lovely filth over here….
Caroline
@Jay:
“I would humbly suggest, given much of the current crop of CEO’s, that one could take a random unhoused person off the street…”
So “Trading Places” wasn’t a comedy, it was a how-to!
Mart
Years back disc golfing with some yutes I brought up the Missouri ballot measure for a minimum wage increase. The young men told me it was BS. I am a trained mechanic and make $17 bucks an hour, why the fuck should somebody get $15 bucks an hour to flip a burger? I tried the old it should lift your wage up too; but that is a hard sell.
gvg
@Soprano2: I worked in a few (small sample size) restaurants 35 years ago. Other people stories tended to be the same in my area. However, I would think it was harder now. I do doubt that those tips are all going to the employee who actually serves me or even those working there that day. I still think they should just get a proper wage and I should get a real price on the menu. And corporate CEO’s should get paid less.
StringOnAStick
@Soprano2: It is true as you say that most retail shrinkage is due to employees. Retail management knows this but one thing they keep cutting back on is loss prevention employees. They’re still making the calculation that the amount of theft is cheaper than having more employees.
stinger
@Aussie Sheila:
WTF?
Juju
@Jay: Isn’t that the plot of the movie “Trading Places”?
billcinsd
There were a couple studies a few years ago that showed that doubling the wages of everybody, from the fry guy to the CEO, at McDonalds would raise the cost of a Big Mac by a quarter. Another study showed that increasing the minimum wage to $20/hr would add like a penny to the cost of a restaurant meal in Florida. Basically much of the cost of food when you eat out is fixed costs not wages.
evodevo
@Jay: That’s why I STILL tip with cash, when I can. That way I know it goes into their pocket, not the manager’s…
Dopey-o
Didn’t Hilary call half of Baud’s supporters “deplorables” and say we shold be put in a basket and drowned like jittens?
Or something? I forget.
SteverinoCT
My wife has worked for a retail chain for 20 years in a full-time non-management position. She got a raise this spring to $15.35/hr. She just beat the state increase of the minimum wage. So now a new-hire part-timer is making $15/hr. Is she expecting another raise commensurate with her seniority? I guess she can contemplate that while going in at 6:00am because they are under-staffed.