Worse Than Walmart

Ray Kroc, the guy who bought up a little diner and turned it into a global colossus, worked hard and accomplished a great thing. The executives who "run" McDonald's now, however - not so much. I mean, really, how smart do you have to be to rake in the profits from a giant corporation that perpetuates itself?

 

Kris E. Benson at Wonkette:

Time is money, you guys, and money is time (as well as speech) which is why this nice McDonald’s worker would have to work for ONE MILLION HOURS to make as much as the McDonald’s CEO did in 2011 alone. The CEO’s time is just that much more valuable, so the Market has put a fair price on his time, because the Market is infallible.

Also, if this nice McDonald’s employee wants to make more than minimum wage (which he still earns after 20 years with the company) he should have found a way to make his labor more profitable, and also too, to not look or smell like he works at McDonald’s, because the stink of the proletariat is too disgusting for management to bear.

Tyree Johnson scrubs himself with a bar of soap in a bathroom and puts on fresh deodorant. He stashes his toiletries in a Kenneth Cole bag, a gift from his mother who works the counter at Macy’s, and hops on an El train. His destination: another McDonald’s.

[...]

He needs the makeshift baths because hygiene and appearance are part of his annual compensation reviews. Even with frequent scrubbings, he said before a recent shift, it’s hard to remove the essence of the greasy food he works around.

“I hate when my boss tells me she won’t give me a raise because she can smell me,” he said.

Fair warning: if you work at McDonald’s, it is inappropriate to show up to work reeking like a proletariat. All evidence of your labor must be scrubbed from your person and THEN you can ask about a raise, so let that be a lesson to you.

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks [from two different McDonald's] to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city’s north side. While he’s worked at McDonald’s stores for two decades, he still doesn’t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois.

Are you taking notes? Because apparently, this is part of the New American Reality of crappy, non-union jobs in retail or food service.

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But we digress. Back to Tyree Johnson, who works TWO jobs at TWO different McDonalds and has done so for 20 years and still earns minimum wage.

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Oh KRIS, you are such a liberal Marxist so-and-so, fast food has always been home to shitty jobs, everyone knows that, tell us something we don’t know. And this is true — fast food has always had a reputation of being filled with low-paying jobs best given to teenagers, or if that’s not possible, to Demographic Americans (brown people). But the pay is getting worse and worse, and it is no longer just teenagers that are getting these low-paying jobs, as should be obvious since fast food restaurants remain open during school hours.

The pay gap separating fast-food workers from their chief executive officers is growing at each of those companies. The disparity has doubled at McDonald’s Corp. in the last 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. At the same time, the company helped pay for lobbying against minimum-wage increases and sought to quash the kind of unionization efforts that erupted recently on the streets of Chicago and New York.

The wage disparity, by the way, is probably best illustrated by this fun fact:

Johnson would need about a million hours of work — or more than a century on the clock — to earn the $8.75 million that McDonald’s, based in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook, paid then-CEO Jim Skinner last year. [...] While Johnson has benefited from small pay raises and some minimum-wage increases — the rate was boosted from $8 in 2010 in Illinois — he said he’s often knocked down to the lowest level when a McDonald’s franchise changes ownership. He’s been bounced to different stores in Chicago (he’s worked at six in all), which also results in pay getting cut to minimum wage, he said.

Skinner wouldn't last five minutes behind a McDonald's counter, whereas we'd bet Johnson's 20 years of real work at the company would bring badly-needed insight and perspective to the corporate suite.

We need a new definition of "work" in this country, because sitting around with your buddies plotting new ways to fuck over workers, obesify the nation and re-establish serfdom does not spell "work" in any rational world.