Wage Theft in the Fast Food Industry

The fast-food workers are expressed as a pond in a bigger game. They have to deal with their low pay in order to ensure low prices by these franchises. Jencunas concerns go on to represent the beginning of a bigger chain effect. Briefly, he states that, “The average fast food store would go from profitable to unprofitable overnight. Some would close immediately, leaving their workers worse off than they were when working for $7.50 an hour, while others would raise prices and try and remain in business, hurting consumers” (“Don't Deserve Any More, or Less”). Evaluating his reasoning we see that if fast-food workers ask for a higher minimum wage, they will in return influence the profit margin and actually increase unemployment rate in this industry. The researchers go on to inform us that if their minimum wage increases the industry won’t be able to afford the change in their profit margin and result in bankruptcy. However, Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which supports the fast-food strike states a different claim:

“I’m working a part-time job at Wendy’s.” What is the first thought that comes to your head when you hear this sentence? Greasy fries, polyester uniforms, cheap food? What about the people who work there? Do you picture a first-time worker, a high school dropout, other pimple-faced workers taking your order? For some reason, in our society, we’ve associated low-quality workers with low-quality food? In his article “Working at Wendy’s” Joey Franklin paves the road towards a new perspective about those who come to work at Wendy’s. Instead of explicit points and unshakable statistics, and powerful calls to action, Franklin alternatively leads gently us through a process of revelation. Drawing from his own experiences working at his local Wendy’s Franklin gives an eye-opening view into the world behind the counter.

When working at a fast food restaurant, more often than not it is accompanied with a stigma. People tend to believe that those who work in fast food restaurants are not capable of anything better. They assume people working at fast food restaurants are slow and uneducated, or they simply look down upon them because these jobs have become known as "dead-end jobs." This so-called "dead-end job" is what people might describe as low-wage labor that employees have a susceptibility to become trapped in. Fast food employee’s face many challenges, morally and socially.

The employment practices of the fast food chains also leave a lot to be desired. They are a great part of the reason that people need more than one job to survive. Because they have so many minimum wage jobs – even managers only make about $10 to $15 an hour. That had become a norm in the US, where people don 't even make a livable wage.

Fine dining restaurants, upscale stores, and discount stores are prospering. Meanwhile, more casual restaurants and stores are suffering. This can be described as the byproduct of the lower and upper classes taking over our economy, as the middle class slowly diminishes right before our eyes. John G. Maxwell, head of the global retail and consumer practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers stated this, “As a retailer or restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be. You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.” Middle class jobs are continuing to decline and before we know it America could be looking at a two class system rather than the three class system.

How do booming national and international chains- restaurants, hotels, retail outlets, cleaning services, and eldercare facilities – affect the treatment and aspirations of low-wage workers? Consider how market competition and the push for profits drive the nickel and dimming of America's lowest paid.

“I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.” (Susan B. Anthony) Susan B. Anthony said this over a hundred years ago, when the woman’s suffrage movement was just beginning in the United States. Even after all this time, the gender wage gap is a still hot topic in the United States today. Popular stars and politicians including Kate Winslet, Jennifer Lawrence, and Hillary Clinton all have something to say about it. There is even a section of thewhitehouse.gov dedicated to discussing the gender wage gap which is the comparison of women 's wages to men’s wages in the United States (“Equal Pay”). It is pretty common knowledge in the United States that women make 78 cents to a man’s dollar. However, it is not common knowledge that this is only comparing white women to white men (“The Simple Truth”). Women of color make even less than that, Latinas making the least, only 54 cents to a white man’s dollar. The Latina wage gap is largely ignored by the media because of the complicated politics of racial and gender based discrimination.

With the mass production of low wage jobs, businesses have the ability hire their lackeys by the dozen. Corporations thrive on the cheap availability of their employees and never feel compelled to increase pay allotments, simply because they know new, more desperate applicants will be coming through their doors to replace the previous groups. For employers, low wage jobs are perfect; employment is high, and paychecks are low?great for overall profit of business. However, for employees, the situation is much

This forcing them to spend less on food, health care, and transportation. They reported, “Low-income families with children and severe housing cost burden spend 75 percent less on health care than their peers without housing affordability challenges.” and that, “Sixteen million renter households earn less than $25,000 a year, and the typical renter earned $37,900 in 2015.” These statistics show that the income to healthcare and rent ratio are clearly in disportion of affordability. According to National Law Employment Project the top companies in the fast food industry made a combined profit of 7.4 billion dollars in 2013, but over 50% of all their employees are getting some form of government subsidies, which comes from tax dollars that can be used in other much needed areas, if companies would substitute some of that gap with their massive

Since 2008, McDonald’s and Walmart corporations have paid their employees’ by the same federal minimum wage amount of $7. 25 per hour (Friedman, 2015). Not until recently, news stations have reported that most McDonalds and Walmart employees live below the poverty line. In fact, McDonalds has started their own McResource Line to give their employees advice on how to provide for their families while living on a minimum wage budget. Soon after, the company renounced their website after the backlash it caused from the media. Therefore, McDonalds and Walmart decided to raise their minimum wage to $9 an hour (Gasparro and Morath, 2015; Friedman, 2015). After researching, I believe large corporations such as McDonalds and Walmart should have to pay living wages, and it is extremely unethical for these

The reality is that salaries have not been increasing fast enough to keep up with inflation. In the article “PRO/CON: Living Wage for Fast-food Workers?” it states that “It would be $17 per hour today instead of a meager $7.25” proving that salary is not increasing as fast as inflation. In “Mcdonald’s Raising its Minimum Wage, but Some Say it’s Not Enough” it is said “Mcdonald’s projected by the end of 2016, the average wage rate for employees at its company-owned locations would exceed $10 an hour.” Even with this slight increase wage theft that is being performed by many fast food companies makes it difficult to support a

What you don’t know won’t hear you right? Well sometimes you need to know in order to survive. Meat factories and fast food restaurants are filling our bodies with foods they wouldn’t feed their own. Upton Sinclair, the author of the book the book The Jungle, lets these factories have it when he publishes these harsh but true words about them. Eric Schlosser, wrote Fast Food Nation, and put restaurants on blast about their harsh working conditions they put immigrants through and the terrible sanitation. Both of these books broadly exposes factories and fast food restaurants for what they really are.

Therefore, in order to make the American Dream achievable to everyone, income wages must increase for those in the lower class and government welfare should be provided to all Americans in order to increase the opportunity of social mobility. Though income inequality may seem as an inevitable issue that just happens to plague many Americans who choose to work in blue collar jobs, current economic inequality is more realistically the result of unfair economic policies that threaten to worsen if they are not immediately addressed. The poor conditions of the workers who work for long hours with little pay demonstrate that America is at a crucial point, and that without immediate action, the country will continue to plunge further downward into a less mobile and more contrasted

The fast food workers are being exploited and underpaid. They work long hours with very little pay and are treated horribly. As a matter of fact, “the industry’s wages are so low that even those front line employees who work 40 hours per week are often forced to rely on public assistance, and only 13 percent have access

There are many inequalities prevalent in the US, and as a capitalist society, one of the most common is economic inequality. The Equality Trust defines economic inequality, as the gap between the well off and less well of in regards to overall economic distribution (“How Is”). See, our capitalist society strongly benefits those with a capitalist mentality and can afford the means to invest/own capital. Over the years there has been an increasing wealth gap between the top one percent earners and the general population. So why are the rich flourishing while the poor are struggling in this capitalist environment? The policy decisions of our country allow this inequality to permeate throughout our industries, thus creating a culture of power and greed. One result of this culture is the explosion of high salaries in the US and Emmanuel Saez explains this trend in Striking it Richer. Saez affirms, “Indeed, estimates based purely on wages and salaries show that the share of total wage and salaries earned by the top 1 percent wage income earners has jumped from 5.1 percent in 1970 to 12.0 percent in 2006” (Grusky 89). Too bad that the 99 percent of America missed out on this massive economic growth spurt. When economic growth is not evenly distributed among the general population, people tend to question our entire system. This has been an increasingly controversial issue, where corporate America is responsible for the constant exploitation of low-level employees. Through my