Strikes have consequences

metalman

metalman

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The River North Snarf's sandwich shop was closed for four days, from December 5 until December 8, as employees went on striking for higher wages and better benefits, picketing the store using the slogan "Fight for $15".


Workers at fast food restaurants typically make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, are striking for a $7.75 pay increase, wanting to increase their earnings to $15 an hour.

An employer will not hire a additional worker unless revenue brought in by the worker exceeds the cost of employing the worker, if the costs of employing the worker are increased, the employer must balance cost and revenue.

'The store is closing, effective tomorrow, December 23, 2013 for an unknown period of time for this remodeling and reconcepting. All staff is terminated, effective Monday, December 23, 2013.
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Oops! looks like the workers didn't realize the choice was minimum wage or nothing ,,,​
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Furious members of the Worker's Organizing Committee of Chicago gathered outside the store Monday morning demanding severance pay and re-employment for the fired staff.
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Protesting outside the closed store ...​
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Director of operations Doug Besant said in the email the restaurant will likely close for a month as they remodel and reconcept the business into a burger joint.
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Sounds like the business was already failing and most likely because the owners were assholes.
 
strikes Do have results: When Rosa Parks refused to move out of her seat on the bus and eventually the entire black population stopped taking buses for a year the company lost money. They were forced to change their idiotic policy.

you have to know when to strike and how to do it so it has the correct devastating effect
 
cecilia said:
strikes Do have results: When Rosa Parks refused to move out of her seat on the bus and eventually the entire black population stopped taking buses for a year the company lost money. They were forced to change their idiotic policy.

you have to know when to strike and how to do it so it has the correct devastating effect
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strike

41. to leave off (work) or stop (working) as a coercive measure, or as at the close of the day.

42 a. to declare or engage in a suspension of (work) until an employer grants certain demands, such as pay increases, an improved pension plan, etc.
42 b. to declare or engage in a suspension of work against (a factory, employer, industry, etc.) until certain demands are met.


boy·cott

1. to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion: to boycott a store.
2. to abstain from buying or using: to boycott foreign products.
 
Glaucus said:
Sounds like the business was already failing and most likely because the owners were assholes.
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Independent restaurants suffer from a failure rate as high as 60 percent, over the first five years of being in business.

Seems the employees strike helped speed up the failure​
 
Strikes do indeed have consequences. Sometimes favouring the strikers, sometimes not. What cannot be denied is that the positive effect from organised labour withdrawal has helped to establish better conditions for workers in many countries, over many decades.

Withholding your labour in order to gain better working conditions often involves the risk of not having any more work at all. If these workers felt they were no longer prepared to work for $7:25 an hour, that's their choice. I'm pretty sure none of us on Whyzzat would work flip burgers for that kind of reward either. I certainly couldn't pay my relatively minor bills with that wage level unless I worked about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week.


Oh, and Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it. :pint:
 
NOT striking has consequences as well. We could all be working 16 hour days on starvation wages in unsafe conditions if we hadn't had people who were willing to fight for better. Remember that happy satisfied workers don't strike and strikers have always known they were taking risks. Striking happens when the downside of striking is outweighed by the downside of not striking.

Back in the day if workers went on strike the Pinkerton boys would be called in to beat and shoot them. Actually, that sort of thing still happens, just in other countries.

Strong unions brought the growth of the middle class and prosperity to the masses. The economics of squeezing the bottom leads to an economic death spiral where wages are pushed down so people have less to spend so costs must be cut to meet what they can pay so wages have to be pushed down and all the while the top tier owners get so much money they can't possibly spend it all and instead "invest" it in financial instruments and assets driving inflation in those classes of items. The stock market isn't going up because the companies are healthy, it's going up because rich people need somewhere to keep their money. Meanwhile people who work for a living have three jobs and still need for food stamps!
 
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@metalman
I never use those things. Do companies ever give you a discount for the money you are saving them by doing the work of the cashier? No, they do not.
And I leave my tray and garbage on the table too. That's devilishly hard to automate.

but there's the rub, automation will eventually be able to replace all labour - and it will be able to replace a lot of what the "thinking" trades believe they bring to the table. So, when that happens, how does the economy work when most people don't have jobs (because there are no jobs that can't be done cheaper by machine) and therefore no money to participate in it. To live a comfortable life these days with the technology we have no-one really needs to work more than 3 hours a day to satisfy their needs, and yet the wealth being produced mainly ends up in the hands of a few who have some paperwork saying they own it and a government provided policing system to back it up.

When the plantation owners discovered fossil fuel powered machinery what happened to all the slaves? They "got their freedom" and went to jail.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
@metalman
I never use those things. Do companies ever give you a discount for the money you are saving them by doing the work of the cashier? No, they do not.
And I leave my tray and garbage on the table too. That's devilishly hard to automate.
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There are restaurants for that market, they have waitresses to take your order and clean up, and they want a tip for doing a good job (and deserve it too )

In a fast food restaurant your paying for speed and convience, you are expected to clean your table of trash when you leave, just like at a self serve gas station, you pump the gas yourself

The labor is the biggest cost in the price of an item in a restaurant, which is why there are so many all you can eat buffet restaurants
 
metalman said:
The labor is the biggest cost in the price of an item in a restaurant, which is why there are so many all you can eat buffet restaurants
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So how will the economy work when everything is self serve with only the raw materials being the cost and those materials owned by a few?
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
So how will the economy work when everything is self serve with only the raw materials being the cost and those materials owned by a few?
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Some days you eat fast food, some days you go for the all you can eat buffet, some days its the Food Truck or the Hot dog cart, consumers have choices, you don't eat at Ruth Chris every day, unless your on a government expensive account of coarse

Nothing is preventing you from starting your own restaurant, but if your going full service, the food will be 'premium" priced
 
metalman said:
Some days you eat fast food, some days you go for the all you can eat buffet, some days its the Food Truck or the Hot dog cart, consumers have choices, you don't eat at Ruth Chris every day, unless your on a government expensive account of coarse
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That's some lovely hand waving generalities that don't really address the quoted text. BTW, Ruth Chris is STILL peasant food and a government expense account is nice but not nearly top of the line. The sales guys at my old company had no trouble picking up a $3000 bar tab and that's pretty run of the mill for corporate sales, I am given to understand. Guys further up, with the real money. When the concord was still flying there were plenty of folks who needed to go shopping in London for the day and visit, maybe pop in at the Dorchester at $300 per plate for lunch. But, for people who earn more than a thousand times what the median American earns, who cares spend merely 50 times what "poor" people would spend on lunch?

But you know what is more important to business than costs? Profits. And who is going to come and spend their money at your business when no-one earns any money except the people who don't want to eat fast food but would rather fly somewhere else for something more suited to their class?
 
In Australia the minimum wage is $17.50 per hour.
 
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