Fast-Food Wages Come With a $7 Billion Side of Public Assistance
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-15/mcdonalds-low-wages-come-with-a-7-billion-side-of-welfare
Talking about salaries, that fundamental measure of what someone’s labor is worth by someone else’s calculation, is usually fraught. Talking about the minimum wage is often harder, especially because low-paying service jobs tend to be more readily available these days than alternative occupations.
When fast-food workers staged protests this summer to demand the federal minimum wage be raised from $7.25 to $15 an hour, even sympathetic observers weren’t optimistic about the prospects. There seems to be a ready supply of people who will work for low wages. And higher wages could lead to higher prices, which few so far seem willing to pay; my colleague Venessa Wong figured that if fast-food wages doubled and companies did not reduce other costs, the price of a Big Mac could increase by $1 to offset the increase.
STORY: Are American Taxpayers Subsidizing Wal-Mart's Low Wages?
Two studies released today make some different calculations to determine the total cost to American taxpayers of a large, low-wage workforce. It comes to an average of $7 billion a year. That’s the amount of annual public assistance families of fast-food workers received between 2007 and 2011, according to a new report written by economist Sylvia Allegretto and others, sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley’s Labor Center and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and funded by Fast Food Forward, the group that helped organize the summer’s labor strikes. The authors used publicly available data.
The report calls out the fast-food industry for its low wages, citing a median salary of $8.69 an hour and a history of offering part-time work. ...........
