I'm citing the NYTimes because you're a Lib and you're supposed to pass this along to your Lib-ass friends.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark-economy.html
Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included. The McDonald’s workers in Denmark get six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan. And like all Danes, they enjoy universal medical insurance and paid sick leave. One reason Denmark was more effective than the United States in responding to the crisis is that no Dane hesitated to seek treatment because of concerns about medical bills.
Abu Sayeed knew that Americans working in fast food don’t do so well. “I heard about the movement,” he said, trying to remember its name. “Fight for something. Fight for $20? What was it?” “Fight for $15,” I explained. “They want $15 an hour. There was an awkward silence. He nodded sympathetically. Then he tried not to sound condescending. “I feel for them,” he said earnestly of American workers at McDonald’s.”
Danes pay an extra 19 cents of every dollar in taxes, compared with Americans, but for that they get free health care, free education from kindergarten through college, subsidized high-quality preschool, a very strong social safety net and very low levels of poverty, homelessness, crime and inequality. On average, Danes live two years longer than Americans.
A Big Mac flipped by $22-an-hour workers isn’t even that much more expensive than an American one. Big Mac prices vary by outlet, but my spot pricing suggested that one might cost about 27 cents more on average in Denmark than in the United States. That 27 cents is the price of dignity.
Americans assume that Danish wages must be high because of regulations, but Denmark has no national minimum wage, and it would be perfectly legal for a construction company or a corner pizzeria to hire workers at $5 an hour. Yet that doesn’t happen. The typical bottom market wage seems to be about $15 — about twice the federal minimum wage in the United States, a country with a roughly similar standard of living. Why is that?
One reason is Denmark’s strong unions. More than 80 percent of Danish employees work under collective bargaining contracts, although strikes are rare. There is also “sectoral bargaining,” in which contracts are negotiated across an entire business sector — so in Denmark, McDonald’s and Burger King pay exactly the same — something that Joe Biden suggests the United States consider as well.
Yet there’s another, more important reason for high wages in Denmark.
“Workers are more productive” in Denmark, Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, noted bluntly. “They have had access to more and higher-quality human capital investment opportunities starting at birth.”
In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity. Increasingly, I came to see that emulating a Danish-style system of high wages wasn’t just about lifting the minimum wage but, even more, about investing in children.
“higher-quality human capital investment opportunities” is a phrase that makes me want to die
Hey, we might be cogs but at least
massahour nation takes care of us
I fucking love the narrative that increasing the minimum wage will cause people to lose their jobs because it'll make companies cut down on staffing.
Big companies don't hire more people than they feel are strictly necessary to do jobs. They try to do as much as possible with as few people as possible because that's what's cheapest. If Micky Deez Nuts needs five people for the kitchen, they're hiring five people for the kitchen, not six or ten or whatever.
Manufacturing jobs can be lost overseas, but most of those are already gone. Unless the minimum wage goes so high that it literally becomes cheaper to develop and implement technology to replace you, you're not going to lose your service job just because minimum wage goes up.
Minimum wage increases do decrease the supply of jobs available, this is a well documented thing that occurs. The problem though isn't that the wage is higher in a broad sense, it's that you're increasing it and each increase requires some level of restabilization as the amount of stuff people can afford begins to change.
Also with certain services if the cost goes up, people will just do whatever that thing was themselves (this is especially true with things like Taxis).
Fuck making $22 an hour.
You work there, you own a piece of McDonald’s and not in the way we think of stock market ownership, but real collective ownership. I’m tired of making these basic pleas to ghouls. They want McDonald’s workers to make their burgers and die from the virus. We have so much wealth in this country and we just allow the bourgeoisie to steal from us. It’s time we take that shit back and stop begging for the ability to survive.
Stop violating premise #1:
I’m citing the NYTimes because you’re a Lib and you’re supposed to pass this along to your Lib-ass friends.
Yeah we did this with $15 an hour and $10 before that. I think it’s the wrong way to frame things because it doesn’t actually lead anywhere. Just people making enough so they can shut up the libs. Talk to most libs and they’ll agree on whatever pay raise. I was making this exact amount and still had to live in a shared apartment in a rent controlled property. It does nothing to help us recoup the wealth we deserve and your better off telling your lib friends they should own the company where they’re working because it’s their labor allowing the company to run in the first place.
That still is not leading us to our goal of collective ownership. Denmark has more unions. So we could start with advocating for more unions. And use this as an example of how your wage becomes more likely to increase once you have a solid union, but even the unions in the states are often corporatists who create awful deals for workers and then say “well at least you have health insurance.” Min wage may still be a better idea in the immediate. And advocate for these workers to occupy their workspace until they get more concessions.
I agree that’s why I was saying in the immediate. Long term it would be better to have strong unions. But if I’m going to choose milque toast unions vs. min wage. Right now I’m choosing min wage. I could see where one would disagree with that take.
Do you really think that a collectively owned mcdonalds would pay more than 22/hr? I highly doubt if the of the profits before labor of a single store were all being directed to workers pay the pay would be much higher than this. Family owned and operated restaurants in the US don't make people wealthy and they usually charge a lot more than fast food places.
"it's a starter job, they don't deserve more"
But McDonalds deserves the entire profit while the people making the profit work 2 and 3 jobs just to barely afford rent?
doesnt McDonalds China has the best worker right of any mcdonals in the world? plus they have unions and good wages too, and they are lead by CPC members
22 USD is 135DKK and that is actually really low. After taxes it is around 91dkk/hour, and there are even lower paid jobs. Here the problem is that most of those Mcdonlads jobs are in Copenhagen, where rents are crazy high. A single room, around 10-12 sqm is very often upwards of 550 USD/Month. Of course things outside of Copenhagen are significantly cheaper. Unionization is a big thing, and most people I know belong to a union. Every first of may the unions even stage a large event in Fallaedparken in the capital, and most people get half a day off to attend ... usually that means just getting beers in the park.
Unfortunately in the last years the government has been trying to go down the neoliberal route and there has been a significant rise of right-wingers - i.e. the danish folkepartiet. Danes are also very nice on the surface, but are actually kinda racist and xenophobic in practice. That said it is a great country to live in and it has a great system and great social safety net.
but are actually kinda racist and xenophobic in practice.
Curious as to what that looks like, in the context of Denmark and its history
Until very recently Denmark was very white and very small (not counting Greenland and the Faroes, that are Danish colonies and Danes have let's say less than stellar history there) so they're still not used to the huge international influx over the last few decades. As a result it can be quite difficult to find a job as a non-dane, especially if you don't have education/skills. It's easier in IT and software. For a lot of places Danish is mandatory even if you don't really need it for the job, and that usually means that if you talk with an accent it's not good enough. Often you won't be considered for positions just on the basis of your name. Everyday casual racism is somewhat spread (I'm pasty white but Eastern European, so I blend in until I speak), and as a foreigner it is fairly common to be asked "when are you going back" in one form or another, and Danes kinda look down on you. A friend of mine who is Thai, has had the cops called on him numerous times when working as a post and has been called the n-word a lot...
So, a similar dynamic as you would find in England, with the whole 'Eastern Europeans/ex-Soviets are taking our jobs' kind of thing.
And I'm guessing their anti-Asian and anti-African sentiments were mostly adopted, rather than the product of their own history.
Its more looking down on Eastern Europeans. I feel like its a lot stronger against asian and african people. For example just today one of the biggest media sites ran a story on how 25% of the infected with Corona have non-western background. And you often see titles like that. A couple years ago the folkepartiet ran some pretty gloomy anti-immigrant posters. The government also wanted to deny people from the EU the same beenfits it gives danes when studying in university, cause it wanted to encourage them to go back to their home countries after graduating or something like that.
Mcdonalds workers in San Francisco make less than this and the cost of a room in SF is going to at least be 1k at the lower end. This is still very much a living wage. But yeah when I visited, I definately got the impression from some of the locals I talked to that there really isn't much of a sense of civic nationalism there (it's all ethnic) when compared to the US or even other european nations. Someone whose parent isn't Danish will never be thought of as Danish even if they grew up there.
Yeah, it is a living wage, especially since most people working there would be students so they also get help from the government for their studies.
For sure, we're still talking about Life Under Capitalism; my point was to illustrate that even a poor-ass McDonald's worker in Denmark still has benefits that are simply unimaginable in America, even if you have a PhD and 'top-tier' job... (6 weeks of paid vacation? 1yr of maternity leave? A fucking pension? Actual functioning healthcare!?, A college education for your child that won't cost $100k++?? etc...)
Yeah, in that sense it is liveable wage. Especially since a lot of people that work in these jobs are also students and they get help from the government as well...
A single room, around 10-12 sqm is very often upwards of 550 USD/Month
Is that supposed to be a lot? In brooklyn a similarly sized room is almost twice that expensive
By local standards it is..of course this is a problem of the housing market and landlords not getting maod
yeah that minimum wage line is what libertarians always cum over, ignoring the unions and robust labor activity part.
Sectoral bargaining is cool, but you know what's cooler? One big union headed by socialists.
I'll still take sectoral bargaining if it's seriously being offered though.
$22-$24/hr is exactly how much the minimum wage would be if you took what it was in the late 60s and adjusted for both inflation and productivity gains.
I fucking hate this evil country. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25/hr. Nowhere in the entire country is about $15/hr afaik. Multiple states can pay waitstaff below minimum wage because they can make it up in tips, supposedly. Absolutely crazy state of affairs.
That thing about productivity is so rude to the poorly educated holy shit.
Its honestly wild to see just the depths of hoe shitty America is and little anyone seems to care about it.
