The past month has seen an escalation in the number of one-day strikes by workers in the fast food industry. Thousands of workers in several cities across the USA have participated in these job actions. Their principal demand is an hourly wage of $15--nearly twice the current national minimum wage of $7.25. And things continue to heat up, with a nationwide strike planned for August 29.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has supported these strikes. Its president, Mary Kay Henry (MKH), even appeared on the Colbert Report to state her case.
While there are undoubtedly many voices and perspectives among the strikes, the SEIU's views (as exemplified by MKH's statements on Colbert and elsewhere) serve as a benchmark. That is unfortunate, since their arguments have serious weaknesses, both rhetorical and substantive. I will highlight three.
(1) When Stephen Colbert refers to fast-food workers as "just teenagers working part-time jobs" , MKH replies matter-of-factly that the average age of these workers is 28. What she wants us to infer, of course, is that the typical fast food worker is a person in their 20s or 30s, and quite possibly providing for a family. She presents a picture of strikers as hard workers struggling to make ends meet, over and against a popular perception of fast food workers as teenagers earning money for video games and iPhones.
Her picture may be correct. But I can't help but suspect that she is selecting a statistics to mislead her audience. There are all kinds of distributions of ages that could yield a mean of 28. Our natural inclination is to think in terms of a normal distribution (i.e. a Bell curve) with most ages group closely around the mean. But the age distribution of fast food workers could be very skewed. Consider the following two groups workers, listed by age.
Group A; 17, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 37, 40
Group B: 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23, 28, 33, 45, 58
Both groups have an average age of 28, but their demographics are clearly very different. In particular, group A contains a single teenager while group B contains three. And in my experience, the age distribution reflected in group B is much closer to what I see in a typical fast food restaurant. Indeed, group B is a much better sample of the overall age distribution in fast food industries than group A.
See here.
MKH and her allies would be better served by giving us more precise measures of the age distribution.
(2) MKH (and others) like to contrast the low wages received by workers with the "record profits" and "billions of dollars" earned by the corporations. This is a dramatic but completely misleading comparison, akin to comparing an apple seed to a full grown orange tree and declaring that an orange is massive relative to an apple. Take McDonald's as an example. Last year it reported $5.5 billion in profits last year, a number the unionists like to cite as evidence of exploitation. But that number needs to be given the proper context, viz., that the earnings come from operations at literally thousands of restaurants (14,000 in the US alone) and are distributed to McDonald's shareholders in the form of dividends. So to get a better sense of whether $5.5 billion is an extreme number or not, we could compare it with the amount of money that shareholder's have invested. Five seconds of research reveals that McDonald's has a market capitalization (the total value of its shares) of $95 billion, meaning that the return on investment is a little less than 6%. That's par for the course for equities, and hardly a sign of exploitation.
(3) The most alarming aspect of MKH's position, is her vision for the future of the American middle class. According to her, the goal of the current job action is to transform bad, low wage jobs into good, middle class jobs. In MKH's future, flipping burgers at Wendy's ought to be a viable career for the middle class.
This is ridiculous. Yes, it is sad that many people have found it necessary to work fast food jobs in order to make ends meet. It is sad that some people have been stuck in these jobs for years. But when did we as a society resign ourselves to thinking that an extended career at Burger King constituted a reasonable path for an otherwise able adult? When was "pizza delivery boy" added next to "plumber" in the dictionary of middle class employment? When did the jobs our parents did as teenagers become the jobs we imagine our children will do as grown men and women?
Let me quite clear: fast food jobs are jobs for teenagers. That this is not true today for many people is sad and deserves a response. But the proper response is not to transform these jobs into "middle class jobs", as though such a transformation could magically happen simply by raising the minimum wage. Because the problem here is not that fast food workers are paid too little. The problem is broader economic weakness and persistent low incomes for certain segments of the population. And these problems--the real ones--will not be solved by anything put forward by MKH or the striking workers.
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