Lisa Benson for April 02, 2024

This is rather hard to jibe with the complaints about California’s chronic labor shortage.

I guess that will be tomorrow’s toon.

Lisa probably makes more than $20 for her chicken scratches.

Keep voting blue Suckers

cuz we all know that companies like to keep more employees than they need on staff, because they are so generous.

They also like passing any savings on to the customers! So the less they have to pay their workers the lower their prices will be!

No problem. Overpaid political pundits can afford a $15 Big Mac.

it’s an entry level job not a life supporting job big mistake

‘cuz America’s vanishing Millionaires and Billionaires are an endangered and protected species, right Lisa? Right now, the never-Trumpies are crawling back to the MAGA fold, not so much to appease their God of Mammon, but to protect themselves in the unlikely event of the re-election of a vengeful MAGA Messiah. Sort of like the uneasy relationship of oligarchs to Putin, in Russia.

After all, one can’t have too much money, and (gasp!) spend more on the Little People, the peons, the riff-raff, the serfs… why that’s blasphemy!

AI robo burger flippers will replace those pesky humans, and the upgrade models will even discreetly spit on your food if you fail to accept he automated tip jar.

And it’s another win-win to squeak another reason for MAGA creeps to have joyful, knee-jerk hatred of California, the 4th largest economy in the world and the bailout source for “red” welfare states, who are all about inflicting as much poverty and cruelty as possible.

Alternate meaning for an IN-and-OUT restaurant.

“Fast food” used to be an entry level job, unless you moved up to management. As a society we need to look at career paths for living wage jobs. The career paths starts in high school, continues through college or trade school, and the employer should encourage continuing education for enhance the skill set. We all fully realize that most employers do not support this. Successful employers value their employees.

I doubt very much that any minimum-wage worker has ever objected to increasing the minimum wage.

Old saying. The TRUE minimum wage is ZERO! When the pay is more than the job is worth the job will be eliminated!

This is exactly why we should ditch our current system of unemployment benefits.

Government should be the employer of last resort setting the base wage at a livable level. If private employers need employees they must compete with the going wage.

There are plenty of reasons why government needs workers. One would be to provide affordable child care services so all who want to can enter the work force.

$20.00 or bust

As if enough people haven’t fled CA already!

Lisa is saying they shpuld be poor and be indeserving of raise to cope inflation?

Don’t you dare to learn to cook…

I personally want the person cooking and serving my food to earn a living wage. Yes, it may a percentage more but well worth it for a “trickle up economy” that truly works. We can rest assured it will not in any way affect McDonald’s executive pay or their corporate jets

Productivity–Pay Tracker Change 1979–2022:Productivity+64.7%Hourly pay+14.8%

Productivity has grown 4.4x as much as pay

Most Americans believe that a rising tide should lift all boats—that as the economy expands, everybody should reap the rewards. This outcome can be guaranteed by smart and compassionate policy choices or subverted by policymakers choosing a different path. EPI’s Productivity–Pay Tracker shows the shift toward the latter: Since the late 1970s, our policy choices have led directly to a pronounced divergence between productivity and typical workers’ pay. It doesn’t have to be this way. Economic Policy Institute

Does anyone buy the deep fried apple pie?

Ray Kroc made the precedent setting decision for the fast food industry when he started franchising… He could pay well and keep employees long term or pay minimum wage and expect a high turn-over rate. Blame him!

More smoke and mirrors to scare people with! If a job is worth doing it is worth a living wage! And you can’t live on $20 an hour in California.

Appears that Benson majored in ‘Economics’ and minored in ‘Social Justice’ at Trump U.

That’s not how the economy works. At all.

Prices are set by market forces, not labor (or other) costs. Profit margins are influenced by cost, obviously. But not prices. The question is whether or not a business is sustainable with the margins it is able to generate. But they won’t layoff workers to cut costs. They would lay them off to cut costs no matter what their employees were earning.

A minimum wage could, theoretically, cause restaurants to close. More likely: they’ll have to accept lower profit margins. If they attempt to pass those costs on to the consumer, the consumer make balk and make other choices. Supply and demand.

The real threat is automation. About 85% of job loss is due to technology, almost all at the lower end, where unskilled labor tends to work. But here’s the rub: in an attempt to improve profit margins, companies are always looking for ways to automate, to leverage technology. Again, this threatens un- and under-skilled workers the most. But companies would do this anyway, with or without the pressure of a higher minimum wage. They always have.

Companies ALWAYS look to do this. They’re not at all interested in “saving jobs,” and won’t refrain from implementing cost-cutting technologies at any point. Just ask the grocery store stock clerk, the elevator operator, the town crier, the secretary pool, or the milkman. Technology replaced them all. And it will replace these workers, too, someday. And it won’t matter if they’re making $50 an hour or 50 cents. They’re gone.

Let’s date ourselves, how many remember the burger wars of the late 60s, when you could get a bucket (about the same size as the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket) of burgers and a bucket of fries with a 32oz drink for $5.00.

Reading a lot of articles by people (non-wealthy) looking to move back to California. Let me say the truth out loud: GOP hates increasing the minimum wage as it might allow a lot of people to only work one job (it is hard to keep people down if they can pay their bills); and, this sort of pay increase only results in higher prices if corporations want to keep paying higher salaries to executives and higher dividends to investors. In short: Keep the poor poor so the rich can be richer. America in one sentence.

Unless you are a rich democrat donor who owns 20 Panera stores. Then the governor will exempt you because you…..make bread in the store. LOL!!!!

IIRC there is a short-term effect, but long-term the company and workers do fine.

Low wage workers are getting fired because businesses can’t raise prices enough to cover the higher costs of doing business? Who could have seen that coming?

Best headline about this subject – California minimum-wage mandate causes maximum damage

In the 1950s, the CEO to Worker ratio at McDonalds was 20:1; now it’s 1,224:1. Let the worker’s salary come out of the overpaid, bloated salaries of the CEO and other executives. Coca Cola’s ratio is 1,883:1. I will have to say this about Amazon; their ratio is 38:1.