Uncovering an industry's lies: Fast food offers few ways to get ahead


Press a fast food chain to pay better wages, and you'll hear some
version of this: "The restaurant industry is a launching pad" or
"[E]mployees who want to go from crew to management can take advantage
of a variety of training and other professional development
opportunities." Those statements, from the New York Restaurant
Association and McDonald's, sum up the argument: Fast food workers may
be making poverty wages now, but they could become managers! Owners! The
possibilities are limitless, so really there's no point in paying people
a living wage! Of course, it's not really true.

A new report from the National Employment Law Project reveals just how
false that story of easy advancement is. In the United States as a
whole, 31 percent of jobs are managerial, professional, or technical. In
the fast food industry, it's 2.2 percent. Front-line
occupations—cashiers and fry cooks and the like—are 89.1 percent of fast
food jobs, and they pay a median wage of $8.94 an hour. That's less than
$18,600 for a year of full-time work, not that most of these jobs are
full-time. And what if you do get promoted? Most of those promotions are
to the 8.7 percent of fast food jobs that are first-line supervisors.
Those pay a median of $13.06.

If you want to be a franchise owner, you already have to be rich in most
cases. At the cheap end, you can get a Papa John's franchise if you have
a net worth of $150,000 and liquid assets of $50,000. But try saving
enough to buy one of those at $8.94 or even $13.06 an hour. And the next
cheapest major franchise is Dunkin Donuts, which requires you to have a
net worth of $500,000 and liquid assets of $250,000, and it goes up from
there. So, no, a low-wage fast food job is not the launching pad to
franchise ownership.

In other words, the fast food industry is the dead end you always
thought it was. The myths of mobility it tries to peddle to justify all
those low wages are just that: myths. The vast majority of fast food
jobs pay poverty wages, and there is no more a franchise ownership
coming for the workers struggling to make a living on pay that even
McDonald's indirectly acknowledges isn't enough to live on than there is
a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

http://tinyurl.com/ks3el99

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Ahh. Amerika...land of opportunity...for the rich to feed off the poor.