Your Average Fast-Food Worker—Who Is Not James Franco—Needs a Raise
“I was treated fairly well at McDonald’s,” a former employee of the chain wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday. “If anything, they cut me slack. And, just like their food, the job was more available there than anywhere else.”
The author of the op-ed has enjoyed great success following a brief stint at age 18 flipping burgers for the chain. And while he wasn’t writing specifically about the labor unrest that McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants have been dealing with in recent years, the author—actor and Ivy League graduate James Franco—presents himself as just the kind of worker the industry would like to believe it employs: young, single, working a first job that, while, yes, is low-paying, is just the lowest rung on a lifetime climb up the working-world ladder—a climb that could take you to a higher position within the company or, like Franco, on to a successful career as an actor and filmmaker.
While McDonald’s was there for Franco in his young, middle-class moment of need, that isn’t the case for the largely minority, largely female workforce that staffs today’s fast-food restaurants. Which is why New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was writing about a very different image of the fast-food industry in the op-ed pages of Thursday’s New York Times.
Cuomo, like the countless fast-food workers who have protested their pay, doesn’t think they can continue to live on their low wages—which average $16,920 a year in New York state. “Nationally,” he wrote, “wages for fast-food workers have increased 0.3 percent since 2000,” adjusting for inflation.
Yet, the fast-food industry shares Franco’s high opinion of the promise of the Golden Arches.
“Only about 5 percent of restaurant industry workers are at the federal minimum wage level—the rest are earning above that—and a little more than 50 percent are teenagers,” Scott DeFife, head of government affairs at the National Restaurant Association, a lobbying group, told the trade publication QSR in 2013.
“In many cases,” he continued, “minimum wage is a starting wage and high performers are moved up quickly. Eighty percent of managers and owners started at entry-level jobs; the industry is really an industry of opportunity.”
Despite what Franco’s nostalgia and DeFife’s stats (which are outdated) would have you believe, the low-wage working reality is no walk in the park. Unlike DeFife’s image of the average fast-food worker—essentially an 18-year-old Franco—Cuomo writes that the industry workforce is 73 percent female, 70 percent are older than 20, and “and more than two-thirds are raising a child and are the primary wage earners in their family.”
The era of the Francoesque McDonald’s worker likely ended in 2008, when the Great Recession led to high unemployment rates, with jobs disappearing altogether in many industries—but not fast food. As a 2014 report from the National Employment Law Project found, 22 percent of job losses during the recession were in low-wage industries, but 44 percent of growth has come in those fields, including fast food.
The governor, a Democrat, tried to raise the state minimum wage for a second time earlier this year, but his budget proposal didn’t pass—so now he’s tasking the state labor commission to look into the labor practices of the fast-food industry in particular. If the Wage Board responsible for the investigation finds employers aren’t paying enough to “provide for the life and health” of workers, it will recommend a raise, which can be implemented without any action from the state legislature.
“No one in New York can survive on $8.75 an hour, so we’ve been on strike nine times.” Flavia Cabral, a 53-year-old McDonald’s employee with two children, said in a statement from the labor group Fight for $15. “All we’ve ever asked for is a fair shot at the middle class and a chance to provide for our families. Today, Governor Cuomo heard us—and soon, I know we’re going to get to $15. I am inspired today, because $15 an hour would completely change my family’s life.”
Related stories on TakePart:
• Fast-Food Work: No ‘American Beauty’
• In Largest Strike Yet, Fast-Food Workers Say They Need $15 an Hour to Survive
• How Low-Wage Fast-Food Jobs Actually Take Money out of Your Pocket
• The New Law Both Fast-Food Workers and Franchise Owners Love
Original article from TakePart
