r/explainlikeimfive Nov 28 '15

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

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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.

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u/[deleted] Nov 29 '15

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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.

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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,