They are at it again!

2

2054172

Guest
The protest is just one of many taking place nationwide to raise pay in low-wage sectors to $15 an hour. Workers on Thursday are expected to walk off their jobs in Michigan and across the nation, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, Wendy’s, Checkers and KFC. Clergy, elected officials and community supporters are also expected to join workers on the strike lines.
http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2013/12/05/fast-food-workers-strike-for-higher-pay-in-metro-detroit/

These anti-establishment people need to get back to work supporting the economy....Oh! I can't keep up the rouse LOL What does the corporation think or care, they make their profits in the millions on the backs of the workers. In Canada we have a minimum wage (in Ontario) of $11.28/hour but they get around paying this by hiring students at a lower rate here is our table of wages.

Minimum Wage Rates

General mininum wage
March 31,2009 $9.50
March 31, 2010 per hour$10.25 per hour

Student Minimum Wage
2009 $8.90 per hour
2010 $9.60 per hour

Liquor Servers Minimum Wage
2009 $8.25 per hour
2010 $8.90 per hour

Hunting and Fishing Guides Minimum Wage
2009 $47.50
2010 $95.00


Rate for working less than five consecutive hours in a day
2009 $51.25
Rate for working less than five consecutive hours in a day
2010 $102.50
Rate for working five or more hours in a day whether or not the hours are consecutive

Homeworkers Wage (110 per cent of the general minimum wage)
2009 $10.45 per hour
2010 $11.28 per hour

This is not a living wage for a person...seeing that NAFTA and Globalization has stripped us of good paying jobs and the majority of jobs being created are service sector / minimum wage. It will only be a little while and we will see this here in Canada also.
If does not show that Governments and corporations are in bed with each other I don't know what does.
 
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Sometimes it's just great to be an Aussie. Yes of course there are wage disputes and industrial actions here but yeah the minimum wages in the US are a joke.

Now I'm not saying that these guys need a pay rise to bring them in line with Rocket Scientists but when your average wage means you can't put food on a table, something is out of kilter. Especially when your employer makes $5.5 billion profits the previous financial year in McDonald's case. And that Walmart story. That even got a run down here on the news last week. I'm sorry when a Walmart store having a donations box for their own staff so they can possible enjoy a Thanksgiving Dinner... WTF? Oh and Walmart made how much profit last year? $15.7 billion.

Ithikial's (adventurous) economic / political prediction... this theme of income inequality is probably going to the major theme over the next decade for western world spearheaded by the problems in the US.
 
I'm thinking the 'Occupy' movement was a bit premature in it's execution, while ignorant of the powers that would ally to suppress it.
 
Facman said:
I'm thinking the 'Occupy' movement was a bit premature in it's execution, while ignorant of the powers that would ally to suppress it.
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Yes your right...but I would think as with most movements they need a goal and a good leader. It could still revive into something functional and if linked to something like this may be just may be.....
 
America America... love it or leave it... at least they have the righ to protest...sans elsewhere...
 
I'm with you guys. We should bend every big company over a barrel and take those evil profits from them. How dare these companies take all that money from those poor defenseless people. I just hope that when we take all the money from them rich money grubbing somes a beotches that they will let us keep our jobs.

I'll say it again. Tthe minimum wage was NOT designed to raise a family on. It was designed to get young and unskilled people into the work force and give them a chance to better them selves by gaining job experience and the chance for advancement. The real failure is all the government programs (some entitlement programs come to mind) that keep people in minimum wage jobs for life. I would support taking some of the profits and applying them to education to help people better themselves. But that would require the couch jockeys to actually get up and do something. So screw it. Lets just hand out the money from the corporations and get a nicer couch.

Didn't something like that happen in Russia around 1917? Doesn't anyone remember how that one turned out? History people. History. It's there for everyone to learn from.
 
2054172 said:
Yes your right...but I would think as with most movements they need a goal and a good leader. It could still revive into something functional and if linked to something like this may be just may be.....
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They did have a leader. But he got a job offer from Microsoft in their marketing department and said, "See ya! I'm out of here you losers!" And then the whole thing collapsed. The talented get hired away. Damn the system!!!!
 
DasTiger said:
I'm with you guys. We should bend every big company over a barrel and take those evil profits from them. How dare these companies take all that money from those poor defenseless people. I just hope that when we take all the money from them rich money grubbing somes a beotches that they will let us keep our jobs.

I'll say it again. Tthe minimum wage was NOT designed to raise a family on. It was designed to get young and unskilled people into the work force and give them a chance to better them selves by gaining job experience and the chance for advancement. The real failure is all the government programs (some entitlement programs come to mind) that keep people in minimum wage jobs for life. I would support taking some of the profits and applying them to education to help people better themselves. But that would require the couch jockeys to actually get up and do something. So screw it. Lets just hand out the money from the corporations and get a nicer couch.

Didn't something like that happen in Russia around 1917? Doesn't anyone remember how that one turned out? History people. History. It's there for everyone to learn from.
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Seeing your country and now mine taking lessons from China the capitalist bastion of the world we should be careful about throwing stones.
Money is the issues and corruption of what we have by governments and companies.

May be you have not figured things out yet...those profits you talk about are not put back into the countries usually but into off shore banks for tax evasion. ( Again not centering out the US because Canada has the same problems)
Do you think that if there was no minimum wage companies would pay better?
Do you think that without government program companies will step up and help the down trodden?
If you do please send me whatever your smoking because it has to be real good. Oh don't get caught because you might be making cheap good in a prison for less then minimum wage.

Reason and common sense people, it's our one hope. Oh yeah write your Congressman, Senator, Member of Parliament, Governor, Mayor write any and all. Hopefully the system will reset to a realistic position.
 
Agree with Das Tiger, Minimum wage jobs are not meant for what these people think they need to be. The problem here is a lot of the "good" jobs that did not require a college education ended up in Mexico with NAFTA and in China. Used to be a person with a high school diploma or even with out one, could make a fair leiving in the manufacturing sector at a decent wage. Those jobs have left, for the most part, and been replaced by lower paying "service" jobs. You can't replace the middle class with lower paying jobs....well you can, but you no longer have a middle class...
 
HOA_KSOP said:
Agree with Das Tiger, Minimum wage jobs are not meant for what these people think they need to be. The problem here is a lot of the "good" jobs that did not require a college education ended up in Mexico with NAFTA and in China. Used to be a person with a high school diploma or even with out one, could make a fair leiving in the manufacturing sector at a decent wage. Those jobs have left, for the most part, and been replaced by lower paying "service" jobs. You can't replace the middle class with lower paying jobs....well you can, but you no longer have a middle class...
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Looks like you talked your self right out of your point.
 
Yes, that's somewhat true, but the fact is that in the US people have many avenues available to move out of minimum wage jobs. There is educational assistance, companies promote people into management, etc. Just because you think you are worth $15 an hour doesn't mean you are worth it
 
There's always going to be minimum wage level jobs. Service industries largely fall into that bracket. They are meant to be a stepping stone for other opportunities, like here in Australia where the majority of McDonalds workers are students rather than middle aged adults with families. HOA_KSOP's point above is very accurate, with the loss of manufacturing jobs as we've seen across most of the western world those workers which historically worked in manufacturing have to go somewhere and are filtered out to other sectors of the labour market. Some will undoubtably fall into minimum wage areas. This is all one little aspect of globalisation which has defined and revolutionised how we do business and how individuals interact with the economy - a revolution that has dominated thinking for about 25 years or so now. As goods are manufactured and transported cheaper from developing world nations, of course you're going to have workers in higher wage countries losing jobs and rightfully complaining while unions draw up picket lines, but at the same time those same workers don't complain nor bat an eyelid when they can by that flatscreen TV for less than $1000 or a car for under $20,000. Unfortunately in economics everything is connected and a change in small area can have ripples across the world over the following years, many of which don't become evident until after the fact.

My point above was a minimum wage job isn't meant to get you everything you desire or make you wealthy, but at the very least allow you to pay the bills and feed yourself and your dependents. If it can't do that, say like these stories from the USA, then whats the point of working the first place? Why do any of us drag ourselves out of bed to put in our '9 - 5'?

But it's a Friday night here, what the hell am I doing typing out work related stuff. ;)
 
"Put in our 9 - 5" There is an entirely different issue. In the good ol' US of A, if you are "only" working 9 -5, then you will never progress beyond the minimum wage job. Like my pappy told me, "If you're not dead by the time you're 30, you didn't work hard enough." I never liked the saying, and believed that, if true, it was a sad state of affairs. But I have always figured if I wanted something, I would just continue to grind away until I got it.

Sort of like one of victory locations that Facman is defending. ;)
 
2054172 said:
Seeing your country and now mine taking lessons from China the capitalist bastion of the world we should be careful about throwing stones.
Money is the issues and corruption of what we have by governments and companies.

May be you have not figured things out yet...those profits you talk about are not put back into the countries usually but into off shore banks for tax evasion. ( Again not centering out the US because Canada has the same problems)
Do you think that if there was no minimum wage companies would pay better?
Do you think that without government program companies will step up and help the down trodden?
If you do please send me whatever your smoking because it has to be real good. Oh don't get caught because you might be making cheap good in a prison for less then minimum wage.
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My dear numberz,

Your video actually makes MY point. And it's always a bonus when someone with an accent is telling me how bad my country is.... But that is another topic.
So the video says how horrible it is to live in the US since we just slam anyone and everyone in prison if they sneeze to much. One of the reasons we have so many people in prison is two fold. One is because we are a country with laws (as are most countries represented on this forum) and we enforce them. Period. We enforce them. Second, it shows that our government programs suck such as public (government ) education, public (government) housing and so on. The programs to help the citizens have failed the exact people they have been designed to help. They didn't give them an education, they didn't give them opportunities. It doomed many of them to a life of looking for assistance instead of teaching them the ways for self improvement. And they turned to a life of crime. It would be interesting to see what the percentage of people in jail had some sort of government program in their lives. I would bet it would be around 75% or higher. And instead of fixing these issues, politicians get elected on false promises of fixing these issue, get elected and then throw more money at the program and think they did something. And then walk away.

And I guess you haven't figured out how publicly traded companies work. To suggest that all profits end up in Switzerland is way off target. Let me explain how it works. A company goes public and issues stock shares. When there are excess profits after expenses and capital investments they issue something called dividends. Most companies do that on a quarterly basis. Lets look at WalMart. They are a publicly traded company. They have approximately 3.26 BILLION outstanding shares. BILLION. On 12/4/14, 2 days ago, they paid 47 cents a share. With my flawed math that comes to something like 1,532,200,000 BILLION dollars out to share holders. And who are those shareholders? I don't know exactly, but there's a bunch of them. And that's where the money goes. Not to one guys bank. Not to the Walton family. But to the share holders. And they use it how ever they want. Here's a great website to see what all those nasty profit making dividend giving companies do about every 3 months:
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/wmt/dividend-history
All the bastards are there. McDonald's, YUM! Brands who owns Taco Bell, Pizza Hut. Those greedy bastards have paid out quarterly dividends four times a year for the last ten years!!!! Apple. Those somes a beothes have the audacity to pay out over $2.50 a share for the past SIX quarters!!!! Damn Steve Jobs! And they have over 889 MILLION shares out. That's over 2,222,500,000 BILLION paid out every 3 MONTHS. I think you get the idea....

If there was no minimum wage do you think they would pay WORSE? I assume so. But I don't. Low wages are a great way to get change. It's called revolution. And if the current minimum wage is too low I expect we will eventually see one. Or the government will raise it if it is needed. Hopefully they will think of a better way to help those people like training or better education, but I don't have much hope.

Do you think that WITH government programs companies will step up and help the down trodden? I guess you do. But I don't think they would. Because they WOULDN'T have any profits to pay out in dividends. And then no one would buy stock and we would have only government run companies. And be like the USSR in about 1979.

But if you think that a socialist utopia is going to solve everything than my statements above will look like a bunch of hog wash. But history has proven me right. Socialism doesn't work. Look at the protesters in Kiev. They know what being buddies with Moscow is like. And it doesn't seem that they want that again. The only places when the poor have been able to have a better quality of life is where capitalism has been allowed to work. And I am describing capitalism that has laws that are enforced by the society it is exercised in.

Thank you for listening.
 
Well Das Tiger just to let you know I love you from the Pinko Commie country of Canada and respect what you think even if your wrong on many issues. That being said...I see your of a very strong opinion and I respect a person, that has given deep thought into what they misguidedly believe. ;)whistling
 
2054172 said:
Well Das Tiger just to let you know I love you from the Pinko Commie country of Canada and respect what you think even if your wrong on many issues. That being said...I see your of a very strong opinion and I respect a person, that has given deep thought into what they misguidedly believe. ;)whistling
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And kisses and respect to you also. I look forward to the day when we can all sit down at a table and discuss the different views that we have. Kind of like the United Nations of FGM. At that time I'll bring a white board and afterwards you will happily trudge through the snow with a new understanding of the warmth that Big Companies bring to the down trodden..... Nahhhh. Well just drink a few and have fun!
 
The first round is on me then we go by arm wrestles for the next rounds. whistling
 
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