18 ms·

The fast-food workers’ season of rebellion

208 points by akkartik 5y ago

kjellsbells 5y ago
There is a tiny window where the workers have more power than usual. I wouldn't be surprised if fast food automation becomes the #1 growth industry in a years time. I applaud anyone with the nerve to fight for better conditions at their workplace, but they need to consider carefully when the best time will be to take their wins before automation is used to crush them.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me in the least that the big fast food companies haven't had plans in the works for a really long time. I think they must know to some extent that human workers will become, perhaps already are, much less economical than robotics. At the same time, automation at that scale and complexity hasn't been battle tested, and public perception may be tainted by replacing people with robots, hence if they are smart then they should be taking their time implementing and deploying automation. In fact it's already happening at a very small scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTcIutsoTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTcIutsoTg I find it hard to imagine that more advanced systems haven't already been in the works for a very long time. If all fast food workers around the world rebelled, I imagine we wouldn't even see Flippy the Robot at first; we'd see all the McDonald's buildings gutted and replaced with complete automation systems that work off of conveyor belts.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  If automation were possible, it would have happened already. Our technology is really far from the point where you can get a machine to reliably construct and sell burgers with no human supervision. Way easier to pay people 25% more than rebuild restaurants from the ground up, and then take the risk your robots don't work as well as you think they do.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  It’s not obvious to me that the window is tiny. The pandemic shook up the job distribution a lot with some people going into retirement and others changing industry. The dynamics of the labour market will surely be quite different if America approaches full employment (roughly, people are unemployed because they are between jobs in the short term and not because there are no jobs to be had). Likely some businesses will have to raise pay or benefits to compete for workers and those companies that cannot will go out of business. Probably that will be good for employees, particularly low-wage low-skill workers and possibly bad for consumers who will not be able to get so many things as cheaply as they used to, though perhaps producers will just become more productive somehow, or increase quality to match increased prices.
jgoewert 5y ago
“There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If the workers did not like it, they could quit." She wasn't planning on doing shit. This was just a copout. Heard those exact words dozens of times.
CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
https://archive.md/Lfi2m https://archive.md/Lfi2m
m0ngr31 5y ago
Good for them
- selectodude 5y ago
  They all found new jobs making more money, too. Supply and demand in the labor market is a two way street.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    But it also seems like they aren't too happy with their new jobs. I think they pulled the trigger on the strike a little early. "Hey Bradford, 100% of employees here think we need a raise of X dollars an hour. Need to hear back from you end of week latest. Thanks." Might've been a better approach.
- black_13 5y ago
  Stimmt. Frankly everyone is getting treated like shit. Im in a highly trained and educated field and im treated exactly like i was when I was when I worked at a call center. My PO gaslighting me to make himself look good to our management. Basically this isnt low wage problem but a wage management problem were those manage see themselves as rulers not stewards.
sonofhans 5y ago
I worked at McDonald’s 25 years ago, for a year during college. It’s still one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. The work is unrelenting; customers treat you like a machine; the pay sucks; the hours are constantly changing; there are no meaningful benefits. All of this is done to reduce the cost and increase the homogeneity of the final product. The product itself has been engineered for decades to be as palate-pleasing and inexpensive as possible. The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such. All of this so we can eat cheap, predictable burgers. It’s the worst kind of poison — that which kills slowly, and sucks the joy from your life as it does so.
- ajay-b 5y ago
  I worked for BoJangles in the 90s at a starting wage of $4.75. They called it a training wage, for 90 days. It sucked, but not the job, or really the customers, it was the management. Managers never had, nor cared for, the respect of their reports.
- dls2016 5y ago
  I still can’t get over the pay people are willing to put up with. I worked at a busy Central PA Red Robin location during high school in the late nineties and usually bused tables. Often the dishwasher would be MIA and I would offer to cover, but only after the restaurant slowed down for the evening (so I could collect on the tip-out from servers) and the rate was $10/hr. I could make a few dollars more bussing and the servers could clear $20/hr or more on busy nights. Over 20 years ago! I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states. Who in the hell wants to do any of these jobs?
  - 1_player 5y ago
    Those that have no other option? I don't get the question at all, not everyone has the chance or luck in life to become a surgeon or a software engineer.
    - dls2016 5y ago
kleton 5y ago
> CORRECTION > A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the percentage difference between a $15-an-hour wage and a $9.25-an-hour wage as a more than a 60 percent difference. It is about 40 percent. The article has been corrected. What? 9.25 * 1.6 = 14.8
- ghaff 5y ago
  It’s about 40% less which is probably how you’d typically describe it. (Of course going from about 9 to 15 would be a 60% raise.) Sloppy wording.
silisili 5y ago
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time. I was in Savannah this summer and had to go to 3 different places to find one even serving. So many places had one employee taking orders and cooking, both. Even Chik Fil A only had 2 people working, and a 45 minute wait. The BK near me, open til 12, has totally random hours, and is often closed by 7. The Arby's is staffed by people who give food first and act weird when you stare because you need to pay still. Corporate? They don't care. I've tried to contact BK twice about a gross overbilling - they just don't care and don't respond. The credit card company said they never even replied to their inquiries. It's all cheap food, and I don't blame the workers at all. Fast food work is awful. I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.
- nradov 5y ago
  There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  > People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8. I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.
  - GhostVII 5y ago
    Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.
dang 5y ago
This article is much better than I expected it to be. It communicates the changes that are happening with low-wage workers more vividly than the many articles on the statistics. It's hard not to feel moved by the stories of the people in the article and hard not to cheer for them. Remarkable reporting.
- slively 5y ago
  Agreed, refreshing to see a main headline and story actually capturing the state of low wage labor in the US, along side a small but growing movement of people no longer willing to put up with it.
908B64B197 5y ago
Maybe it's time to automate this? https://misorobotics.com/ https://misorobotics.com/
- nebula8804 5y ago
  [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WZegFRaaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WZegFRaaY Here is a video of their latest robot. Seems like a joke. The additional seconds taken while its thinking is time that a normal worker wouldn't waste and that is time wasted. Seem like they are using off the shelf robots and bolting on their software. Finally, the mistake GM, Ford and eventually Elon Musk made with robots is that the process needs to be designed from the beginning with robots in mind. Robots follow the BOB acronym: Blind, One-armed, Builder. Make your design so that a blind person that is one armed can do it easily or else a robot will not be able to. These guys are bolting a Robot onto existing processes and this will not work long term(I suspect this was to do cost reduction but it will cost more in the end once it fails to produce effective cost reductions)
- enumjorge 5y ago
  Seriously? We have an article about people working poverty wages and fighting hard to get a little more pay and better working conditions and your response is to worry about how we can automate away their jobs? Wtf.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. Automating them entirely is probably the best way to improve working conditions. You may magically enforce a mandate that managers are non-abusive, but customers will be just as entitled to always being right as before.
    - meepmorp 5y ago
      > The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. It is, though. Being poor is incredibly nerve wracking and expensive, and having more money directly fixes that problem. It's easier to put up with other people's bullshit for $50k/yr vs $25k/yr, all other things being equal.
paul7986 5y ago
Love to understand where are these workers went is it one of the following or a mix of things... - Working now for Amazon, Door Dash, etc which offers flexible hours - Some to more passed away due to Covid - Some are scared to even go back to work - All that unemployment (friend was making 1k a week off it for awhile) money changed people's attitudes towards working and or they saved/invested the money and still are living off of it. If this factor is the largest piece of the pie/puzzle i personally do not want to live in a society in which services that use to be available to readily available are no more cause huge chunks of people aren't working/govt is paying them to do nothing. Wasn't Ycombinator folks pushing for free money ... that didnt work out well for historically for other countries and now here in the US if this is the biggest factor in this puzzlie it's not working out for us (fast food is just the first in line to be negatively affected).
- 93po 5y ago
  Can you please show me how to get paid to do nothing? I'm out of work after leaving an awful job and I'd really love the free money
  - paul7986 5y ago
    if your in the US check out your states unemployment website .. google "whatever state you live in" file unemployment claim. You might be able to get free money which I have in the past as needed but much prefer to work/contribute/reap rewards of working which isnt just all financial it's social..emotional and thus physical. I've been in horrible jobs too and definetily quit them.. i recommend find where you best fit and make sure you are a team player ... a good bandmate who plays in rhythm and tune with everyone else (aka be chill .. do your work as well as you can and be kind ... it will come back to you). Where I work we just got rid of this control freak developer who wanted everyone to work just like him ... umm no dude this is a band and you are throwing us off ... as we are a chill group who do great work together cause there are no egos and b.s. (work in govt. where people are there to do good work not have a pissing contest or climb ladders).
    - 5y ago
jiub 5y ago
> “There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If I was one of those workers I'd be insulted she thought I was dumb enough to believe that old lie.
- frumper 5y ago
  I’d be insulted that she thought they should get raise a raise but they won’t because power.
catlikesshrimp 5y ago
Matts are the unspoken heroes of the world. Low wage salary paying for 4 people who aren't blood family under a roof that is not his.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  How much more homelessness would there be if there weren't people like Matt? I wonder sometimes if rising housing prices push the Matts of the world out and whole families end up on the street.
- nradov 5y ago
  Are you being sarcastic? Matt isn't a hero, he's a sucker being taken advantage of by leeches.
  - geewee 5y ago
    That's a pretty cynical interpretation of someone helping someone else out.
    - gman83 5y ago
      It's true that it's a cynical interpretation, but at the same time I feel that as a society we shouldn't romanticize poor people working themselves to death as some kind of noble struggle. Same issue I had with the Nomadland movie.
DeathArrow 5y ago
Reading sad stories such as this makes me less envious as a citizen of an Eastern European poor country.
b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
> In Bradford, once home to entrepreneurs and wealthy oil barons, the population is shrinking. Buildings in the downtown area are mostly empty. Shut it down already. Just give the land back to the Indigenous people. Concrete back to trees and grass, Greta would be happy.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Let's imagine the government did give the entire of Bradford back to the Indigenous, how do you get rid of all concrete, buildings and pollution while not getting bankrupt because of cleaning costs? How do you actually make concrete back to trees and grass?
  - b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
    A lot of materials from housing can be recycled, not sure about the concrete. Sure, it will be expensive to demolish numerous buildings, factories, replant trees and migrate residents to new thriving cities. But that's a one-time short term cost for long term gains. Think of all those south eastern US cities that get destroyed year after year by tornadoes and hurricanes, yet the government/FEMA still provide aid for them to rebuild... in the same danger zone. For a $9.25 to $10 raise to do the same shit in a dying town, you might as well leave and go to a big city with more people, mixed cultures and better opportunities.
    - helsinki 5y ago
      If someone has been making $10/hr for the past n years, they certainly cannot afford to move to a big city, unless you expect them to live in a homeless shelter.
b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
The H1 title is blocking the McDonald's hiring sign on desktop; good example to use parallax header scrolling here.
ComodoHacker 5y ago
I wonder what the situation is from the business point of view. Have big chains thinned their margins and optimized everything to the point they can't raise pay without raising prices?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  These lines from the article about the owner, Enrico Francani, should tell you what you want to know: >The owner, ferried by his driver, typically visited the Bradford location just once a year, employees said, and not even that often once the pandemic hit. Dustin believed that Francani was relying on his Pennsylvania restaurants — with their low salaries — to offset higher costs in New York where he had to pay his McDonald’s workers $15 an hour. >Francani did not respond to a list of detailed questions regarding his Bradford location. In a statement he said that he had initiated a series of “listening sessions” with workers and was adding paid sick leave and raising starting wages in Bradford. “We’re very grateful for the outstanding efforts of the McDonald’s Bradford team,” he wrote.
DeathArrow 5y ago
If huge fast food chains will disappear, people would actually have a chance to eat healthier and more tasty food.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  Traffic would be a lot better in congested parts of the US as well.
- throwaway09223 5y ago
  Fast food isn't unhealthy. A fast food burger is generally better nutrition (fewer calories) than similar fare from a sit-down restaurant. A diner burger and fries will often have twice as many calories.
  - karolisram 5y ago
    There is so much more to food than calories.
    - throwaway09223 5y ago
      Sure, but fast food is on par across the board in relation to other food of the same type. There is nothing about a diner prepared hamburger that is more healthy. In fact, the opposite is true.
  - ac29 5y ago
    There's a pretty wide variety of options at fast food. A quick look suggests you can get a Burger + Fries at McDonalds that totals 1230 calories: Double Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese + Large Fries. A large drink adds another ~300 calories.
    - throwaway09223 5y ago
      Right, and that's a lot less than a meal in a sit-down place. For example, two days ago here's my lunch from Black Bear Diner: French Fries: 790kcal Parm Sourdough Burger: 1010kcal Soda: 280kcal (same stuff everywhere. Personally I got an Iced Tea which is 0cal at both places) That's 1800kcal for the meal, almost 50% more calories at the sit-down diner. Red Robin? Same, unless you take advantage of the limitless fries in which case the calories are endless ... Nearly any sit-down restaurant will have a burger meal that is substantially worse for you than McDonald's, nutrition-wise. They're bigger and have more fat and sugar, generally speaking. The ingredients in a burger meal is generally the same, but McDonald's has far healthier portions.

208 points by akkartik 5y ago

There is a tiny window where the workers have more power than usual. I wouldn't be surprised if fast food automation becomes the #1 growth industry in a years time. I applaud anyone with the nerve to fight for better conditions at their workplace, but they need to consider carefully when the best time will be to take their wins before automation is used to crush them.

ravenstine 5y ago
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that the big fast food companies haven't had plans in the works for a really long time. I think they must know to some extent that human workers will become, perhaps already are, much less economical than robotics. At the same time, automation at that scale and complexity hasn't been battle tested, and public perception may be tainted by replacing people with robots, hence if they are smart then they should be taking their time implementing and deploying automation. In fact it's already happening at a very small scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTcIutsoTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTcIutsoTg I find it hard to imagine that more advanced systems haven't already been in the works for a very long time. If all fast food workers around the world rebelled, I imagine we wouldn't even see Flippy the Robot at first; we'd see all the McDonald's buildings gutted and replaced with complete automation systems that work off of conveyor belts.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
If automation were possible, it would have happened already. Our technology is really far from the point where you can get a machine to reliably construct and sell burgers with no human supervision. Way easier to pay people 25% more than rebuild restaurants from the ground up, and then take the risk your robots don't work as well as you think they do.
dan-robertson 5y ago
It’s not obvious to me that the window is tiny. The pandemic shook up the job distribution a lot with some people going into retirement and others changing industry. The dynamics of the labour market will surely be quite different if America approaches full employment (roughly, people are unemployed because they are between jobs in the short term and not because there are no jobs to be had). Likely some businesses will have to raise pay or benefits to compete for workers and those companies that cannot will go out of business. Probably that will be good for employees, particularly low-wage low-skill workers and possibly bad for consumers who will not be able to get so many things as cheaply as they used to, though perhaps producers will just become more productive somehow, or increase quality to match increased prices.

jgoewert 5y ago

“There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If the workers did not like it, they could quit." She wasn't planning on doing shit. This was just a copout. Heard those exact words dozens of times.

CaliforniaKarl 5y ago

https://archive.md/Lfi2m https://archive.md/Lfi2m

m0ngr31 5y ago

Good for them

selectodude 5y ago
They all found new jobs making more money, too. Supply and demand in the labor market is a two way street.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  But it also seems like they aren't too happy with their new jobs. I think they pulled the trigger on the strike a little early. "Hey Bradford, 100% of employees here think we need a raise of X dollars an hour. Need to hear back from you end of week latest. Thanks." Might've been a better approach.
black_13 5y ago
Stimmt. Frankly everyone is getting treated like shit. Im in a highly trained and educated field and im treated exactly like i was when I was when I worked at a call center. My PO gaslighting me to make himself look good to our management. Basically this isnt low wage problem but a wage management problem were those manage see themselves as rulers not stewards.

sonofhans 5y ago

I worked at McDonald’s 25 years ago, for a year during college. It’s still one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. The work is unrelenting; customers treat you like a machine; the pay sucks; the hours are constantly changing; there are no meaningful benefits. All of this is done to reduce the cost and increase the homogeneity of the final product. The product itself has been engineered for decades to be as palate-pleasing and inexpensive as possible. The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such. All of this so we can eat cheap, predictable burgers. It’s the worst kind of poison — that which kills slowly, and sucks the joy from your life as it does so.

ajay-b 5y ago
I worked for BoJangles in the 90s at a starting wage of $4.75. They called it a training wage, for 90 days. It sucked, but not the job, or really the customers, it was the management. Managers never had, nor cared for, the respect of their reports.
dls2016 5y ago
I still can’t get over the pay people are willing to put up with. I worked at a busy Central PA Red Robin location during high school in the late nineties and usually bused tables. Often the dishwasher would be MIA and I would offer to cover, but only after the restaurant slowed down for the evening (so I could collect on the tip-out from servers) and the rate was $10/hr. I could make a few dollars more bussing and the servers could clear $20/hr or more on busy nights. Over 20 years ago! I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states. Who in the hell wants to do any of these jobs?
- 1_player 5y ago
  Those that have no other option? I don't get the question at all, not everyone has the chance or luck in life to become a surgeon or a software engineer.
  - dls2016 5y ago

kleton 5y ago

> CORRECTION > A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the percentage difference between a $15-an-hour wage and a $9.25-an-hour wage as a more than a 60 percent difference. It is about 40 percent. The article has been corrected. What? 9.25 * 1.6 = 14.8

ghaff 5y ago
It’s about 40% less which is probably how you’d typically describe it. (Of course going from about 9 to 15 would be a 60% raise.) Sloppy wording.

silisili 5y ago

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time. I was in Savannah this summer and had to go to 3 different places to find one even serving. So many places had one employee taking orders and cooking, both. Even Chik Fil A only had 2 people working, and a 45 minute wait. The BK near me, open til 12, has totally random hours, and is often closed by 7. The Arby's is staffed by people who give food first and act weird when you stare because you need to pay still. Corporate? They don't care. I've tried to contact BK twice about a gross overbilling - they just don't care and don't respond. The credit card company said they never even replied to their inquiries. It's all cheap food, and I don't blame the workers at all. Fast food work is awful. I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.

nradov 5y ago
There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8. I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.
- GhostVII 5y ago
  Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.

dang 5y ago

This article is much better than I expected it to be. It communicates the changes that are happening with low-wage workers more vividly than the many articles on the statistics. It's hard not to feel moved by the stories of the people in the article and hard not to cheer for them. Remarkable reporting.

slively 5y ago
Agreed, refreshing to see a main headline and story actually capturing the state of low wage labor in the US, along side a small but growing movement of people no longer willing to put up with it.

908B64B197 5y ago

Maybe it's time to automate this? https://misorobotics.com/ https://misorobotics.com/

nebula8804 5y ago
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WZegFRaaY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WZegFRaaY Here is a video of their latest robot. Seems like a joke. The additional seconds taken while its thinking is time that a normal worker wouldn't waste and that is time wasted. Seem like they are using off the shelf robots and bolting on their software. Finally, the mistake GM, Ford and eventually Elon Musk made with robots is that the process needs to be designed from the beginning with robots in mind. Robots follow the BOB acronym: Blind, One-armed, Builder. Make your design so that a blind person that is one armed can do it easily or else a robot will not be able to. These guys are bolting a Robot onto existing processes and this will not work long term(I suspect this was to do cost reduction but it will cost more in the end once it fails to produce effective cost reductions)
enumjorge 5y ago
Seriously? We have an article about people working poverty wages and fighting hard to get a little more pay and better working conditions and your response is to worry about how we can automate away their jobs? Wtf.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. Automating them entirely is probably the best way to improve working conditions. You may magically enforce a mandate that managers are non-abusive, but customers will be just as entitled to always being right as before.
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    > The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. It is, though. Being poor is incredibly nerve wracking and expensive, and having more money directly fixes that problem. It's easier to put up with other people's bullshit for $50k/yr vs $25k/yr, all other things being equal.

paul7986 5y ago

Love to understand where are these workers went is it one of the following or a mix of things... - Working now for Amazon, Door Dash, etc which offers flexible hours - Some to more passed away due to Covid - Some are scared to even go back to work - All that unemployment (friend was making 1k a week off it for awhile) money changed people's attitudes towards working and or they saved/invested the money and still are living off of it. If this factor is the largest piece of the pie/puzzle i personally do not want to live in a society in which services that use to be available to readily available are no more cause huge chunks of people aren't working/govt is paying them to do nothing. Wasn't Ycombinator folks pushing for free money ... that didnt work out well for historically for other countries and now here in the US if this is the biggest factor in this puzzlie it's not working out for us (fast food is just the first in line to be negatively affected).

93po 5y ago
Can you please show me how to get paid to do nothing? I'm out of work after leaving an awful job and I'd really love the free money
- paul7986 5y ago
  if your in the US check out your states unemployment website .. google "whatever state you live in" file unemployment claim. You might be able to get free money which I have in the past as needed but much prefer to work/contribute/reap rewards of working which isnt just all financial it's social..emotional and thus physical. I've been in horrible jobs too and definetily quit them.. i recommend find where you best fit and make sure you are a team player ... a good bandmate who plays in rhythm and tune with everyone else (aka be chill .. do your work as well as you can and be kind ... it will come back to you). Where I work we just got rid of this control freak developer who wanted everyone to work just like him ... umm no dude this is a band and you are throwing us off ... as we are a chill group who do great work together cause there are no egos and b.s. (work in govt. where people are there to do good work not have a pissing contest or climb ladders).
  - 5y ago

jiub 5y ago

> “There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If I was one of those workers I'd be insulted she thought I was dumb enough to believe that old lie.

frumper 5y ago
I’d be insulted that she thought they should get raise a raise but they won’t because power.

catlikesshrimp 5y ago

Matts are the unspoken heroes of the world. Low wage salary paying for 4 people who aren't blood family under a roof that is not his.

Seattle3503 5y ago
How much more homelessness would there be if there weren't people like Matt? I wonder sometimes if rising housing prices push the Matts of the world out and whole families end up on the street.
nradov 5y ago
Are you being sarcastic? Matt isn't a hero, he's a sucker being taken advantage of by leeches.
- geewee 5y ago
  That's a pretty cynical interpretation of someone helping someone else out.
  - gman83 5y ago
    It's true that it's a cynical interpretation, but at the same time I feel that as a society we shouldn't romanticize poor people working themselves to death as some kind of noble struggle. Same issue I had with the Nomadland movie.

DeathArrow 5y ago

Reading sad stories such as this makes me less envious as a citizen of an Eastern European poor country.

b0ner_t0ner 5y ago

> In Bradford, once home to entrepreneurs and wealthy oil barons, the population is shrinking. Buildings in the downtown area are mostly empty. Shut it down already. Just give the land back to the Indigenous people. Concrete back to trees and grass, Greta would be happy.

capableweb 5y ago
Let's imagine the government did give the entire of Bradford back to the Indigenous, how do you get rid of all concrete, buildings and pollution while not getting bankrupt because of cleaning costs? How do you actually make concrete back to trees and grass?
- b0ner_t0ner 5y ago
  A lot of materials from housing can be recycled, not sure about the concrete. Sure, it will be expensive to demolish numerous buildings, factories, replant trees and migrate residents to new thriving cities. But that's a one-time short term cost for long term gains. Think of all those south eastern US cities that get destroyed year after year by tornadoes and hurricanes, yet the government/FEMA still provide aid for them to rebuild... in the same danger zone. For a $9.25 to $10 raise to do the same shit in a dying town, you might as well leave and go to a big city with more people, mixed cultures and better opportunities.
  - helsinki 5y ago
    If someone has been making $10/hr for the past n years, they certainly cannot afford to move to a big city, unless you expect them to live in a homeless shelter.

b0ner_t0ner 5y ago

The H1 title is blocking the McDonald's hiring sign on desktop; good example to use parallax header scrolling here.

ComodoHacker 5y ago

I wonder what the situation is from the business point of view. Have big chains thinned their margins and optimized everything to the point they can't raise pay without raising prices?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 5y ago
These lines from the article about the owner, Enrico Francani, should tell you what you want to know: >The owner, ferried by his driver, typically visited the Bradford location just once a year, employees said, and not even that often once the pandemic hit. Dustin believed that Francani was relying on his Pennsylvania restaurants — with their low salaries — to offset higher costs in New York where he had to pay his McDonald’s workers $15 an hour. >Francani did not respond to a list of detailed questions regarding his Bradford location. In a statement he said that he had initiated a series of “listening sessions” with workers and was adding paid sick leave and raising starting wages in Bradford. “We’re very grateful for the outstanding efforts of the McDonald’s Bradford team,” he wrote.

DeathArrow 5y ago

If huge fast food chains will disappear, people would actually have a chance to eat healthier and more tasty food.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Traffic would be a lot better in congested parts of the US as well.
throwaway09223 5y ago
Fast food isn't unhealthy. A fast food burger is generally better nutrition (fewer calories) than similar fare from a sit-down restaurant. A diner burger and fries will often have twice as many calories.
- karolisram 5y ago
  There is so much more to food than calories.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Sure, but fast food is on par across the board in relation to other food of the same type. There is nothing about a diner prepared hamburger that is more healthy. In fact, the opposite is true.
- ac29 5y ago
  There's a pretty wide variety of options at fast food. A quick look suggests you can get a Burger + Fries at McDonalds that totals 1230 calories: Double Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese + Large Fries. A large drink adds another ~300 calories.
  - throwaway09223 5y ago
    Right, and that's a lot less than a meal in a sit-down place. For example, two days ago here's my lunch from Black Bear Diner: French Fries: 790kcal Parm Sourdough Burger: 1010kcal Soda: 280kcal (same stuff everywhere. Personally I got an Iced Tea which is 0cal at both places) That's 1800kcal for the meal, almost 50% more calories at the sit-down diner. Red Robin? Same, unless you take advantage of the limitless fries in which case the calories are endless ... Nearly any sit-down restaurant will have a burger meal that is substantially worse for you than McDonald's, nutrition-wise. They're bigger and have more fat and sugar, generally speaking. The ingredients in a burger meal is generally the same, but McDonald's has far healthier portions.