Fight for 15

The movement by fast food workers demanding $15 per hour pay has been getting more attention lately, and the right-winger ‘compassionate conservative’ trolls have been out in full force, calling anyone who demands a fair wage as lazy deadbeats.

For sadly too many ignoramuses, $15 per hour pay for flipping burgers is some sort of injustice; as if these people who have to hustle every day to serve up those burgers and fries are sub-humans who just don’t deserve much pay at all.

The popular myth is that fast food workers are just young snot-nosed high-schoolers who just want big money for doing nothing meaningful at all.

But the reality is that most fast food workers aren’t adolescents. They’re college graduates who can’t find a decent job in their field in this depressed economy.

They’re the adults who used to have good jobs which were lost due to the shenanigans of criminal Wall St. vermin.

They’re the seniors whose retirement pensions were decimated by the same Wall St. vermin, and now have to flip burgers and greet people at Wal-Mart.

Many of these people do work hard, don’t receive any benefits, are sometimes robbed of the minimum pay they do get, and are treated poorly by management.

The existence of such people in the fast food and retail industries is a testament to how much they’ve all been robbed by the corporate vampires over the long years of work.

All those who are shocked that fast food workers are demanding $15 dollars an hour ought to be ashamed of themselves.


Furthermore, if worker productivity, profits, and inflation were taken into account during the last forty years, the minimum wage today would be above $20 per hour anyway.

People seem to have this skewed, backward notion that just because someone works at a not-so-glamorous job such as flipping burgers or gets dirty at work, that they don’t deserve to get paid a decent wage; that they must settle for a low minimum wage, as if it’s against the law for people doing manual labor to get paid well.

What is more aberrant? A fast food worker who demands decent pay, and who has to stay on their feet for most of the day providing an actual service to someone, or a stock market speculating jerk-off that sits in front of a computer all day playing casino with other peoples’ money who makes hundreds or even thousands of dollars an hour?

It’s clear that the latter is the much worse offender, for he doesn’t do any meaningful work. He doesn’t contribute anything worthwhile to society. He makes money off buying and selling stocks.

The truly sad fact of life in the United States of America is that low-lifes and con-men are praised, lavishly rewarded, and honored, and honest hard-working people are ridiculed, abused, and ripped off.

But what else can we expect from a capitalist system which views humans as mere commodities, and is not concerned with things such as environment and human well-being. Capitalism doesn’t take such things into account as a matter of principle. Only profit matters.

There’s a guy I work with who doesn’t like the fast food workers who are demanding $15 an hour pay. He calls them kids who don’t want to do any real work and want to get paid too much.

But then he turns around and complains about how screwed he gets on pay and benefits. He doesn’t realize that the same people who are screwing him are screwing the fast food workers. He doesn’t realize that those fast food workers should be making $15 an hour, and that he should be making at least twice what he’s making now, if work in this country was fairly rewarded.

The fast food companies are making billions of profits each year. Their CEOs give themselves millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses.

Then they scream when those rank and file workers down in the grease pits, who make all those profits for the companies, demand a fair wage, decent treatment, and benefits.

It all comes down to simple and disgusting greed. It seems that for some people there’s never enough money. They want more and more, and they get it by exploiting, robbing, and squeezing the people who do all the dirty work.

Don’t these cretins who oppose a $15 per hour wage for fast food and retail workers understand that it’s better for the entire economy to have a well-paid workforce? If workers get paid more, they’ll spend more, and will give the economy a boost.

Some of those corporate profits are better-spent on workers than being squirreled away into some offshore bank account.

As much as I support workers’ fight for a decent wage, I don’t like to see unions get involved in this.

Why?

Because if one cares to look back far enough in US history, it becomes clear that US labor unions are not really on the side of workers.

American labor unions, most notably the AFL-CIO, have long ago used their position to prevent workers from uniting and fighting in the spirit of class struggle, which should, and must be the case, as history is really a battle between the haves and the have not’s.

These mainstream unions have taught rank and file workers that they must not take it upon themselves to fight management; that the union heads will do all the bargaining, and workers will only strike when the union leadership tells them to.

This type of union manipulation muzzles and restrains workers. It prevents them from getting real justice and real concessions from the companies they work for.

The labor unions today are staunch supporters of the Democratic Party. But since the Democratic Party sold itself out to Wall St. during the misrule of Billy J. Clinton, the unions also are in Wall St.’s pocket, whether they care to admit it or not.

The labor unions have also gotten too chummy with the corporate bosses.

Labor unions today don’t empower workers; they keep them quiet on behalf of the corporate bosses who in return throw a few scraps to the working masses in order to shut them up, and the labor unions keep on collecting those membership dues.

The fight for 15 movement must not allow unions, notably the SEIU, to highjack their momentum.

The best way to get better pay is to confront the corporate bosses directly, without labor union meddling. It’s harder to do, but if successful, it will yield the best results.

Allow a union to take things over and workers may get slightly better pay quicker, but some of it will then go to the union as membership dues, and the workers are back to lower pay.

One thing is certain. Workers in the US and elsewhere, whether they’re flipping burgers or creating computer programs, are underpaid.

While worker productivity and corporate profits have grown exponentially in the last 35-40 years, workers’ wages have stagnated.

This state of affairs cannot last for long. Sooner or later, the bottom will fall out and the have-not's will get what has been stolen from them by the one-percent.

It’s happened before.