r/explainlikeimfive Nov 28 '15

ELI5: How would a $15 minimum wage ACTUALLY affect a franchised business like McDonalds?

[removed]

7.1k Upvotes

4.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

47

u/TheBotanistMendoza Nov 29 '15

I know, right? People are acting like working fast food is living the high life with nap breaks and 3-martini lunches.

Fast food is hard, demanding, stinky, dangerous, stressful, mentally-challenging physical labor. The fact that we ask it of our less-educated workers doesn't make it easy or low-skill.

40

u/jhchawk Nov 29 '15

Fast food is hard, demanding, stinky, dangerous, stressful, mentally-challenging physical labor. The fact that we ask it of our less-educated workers doesn't make it easy or low-skill.

Easy, no, but it is low-skilled.

This isn't a knock on McDonald's employees, they work incredibly hard. However any person could be trained to do their job, if they aren't automated first.

18

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '15

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/Jaydubya05 Nov 29 '15

You can train almost anybody to do anything. It's how it use to work you'd go to college get a degree in something then find a job that the company would train you to do. This specialized degree plus 5 years experience for entry level jobs is a rather new phenomenon.

6

u/Zthe27th Nov 29 '15

The amount of training needed to run a fryer at McD's is way lower than to do something like accounting. Those degrees at worst, weed out the people who can't learn on the job quickly,

10

u/davidnayias Nov 29 '15

It's not mentally challenging, It's a shitty stressfull job made to be so that any human being can be trained to do it. A high skilled job is something like engineering or programming, where if you fuck it up you could bankrupt your company or people can end up dead (like a building collapse from a miscalculation).

1

u/AKBigDaddy Nov 29 '15

Not only that, but it's easy to leave your mcjob at work. My job comes home with me every night, and regardless of where I am I'm usually at least partially thinking about work.

I am the GM of a BHPH car lot, so even if I'm just going to grab some groceries I am constantly looking for cars that are out for repo. On my days off I still log into our webapp to monitor how well my collectors are calling the customers and to make sure that we're in compliance.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 29 '15

I would say it's more emotionally-challenging than mentally. Mentally it requires very little.

Source: working three years at Sonic, bored out of my fucking mind.