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by idiotsecant 1466 days ago
When are they going to start firing people to make up for the actual effective minimum wage being above 15 bucks for some time now? where I live is not even a particularly high COL area but fast food places hire for 16-17 an hour. They aren't hiring fewer people, they are struggling to hire, in fact! There is so much demand for workers that those places can't convince them to work for double the minimum wage given the crappy conditions they require. The idea that a rising minimum wage will result in lower employment, given that the current wage is lower in real terms than it was 30 years ago, makes absolutely no sense - the real world evidence is literally all around us right now.
1 comments
fugalfervor 1466 days ago
Assuming an even distribution of COVID deaths throughout the 50 states, 20,000 workers per state have died in the last two years. I wonder if that has anything to do with the hiring difficulties fast-food restaurants are facing. The number of deaths is probably also higher among those who would be fast-food workers, since the likelihood of death from COVID was correlated with poverty.
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jimmaswell 1466 days ago
How many 80 year olds were working in fast food in 2019?
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heavyset_go 1466 days ago
Before the pandemic, there were a lot of retirement-aged people working in food service, like an uncomfortable amount. I certainly haven't been out to eat as much as I have before COVID, but what I noticed was a suspicious lack of those older workers I've come to expect working in food service. A lot of restaurants and fast food places are running on skeleton crews, now, some of them with one or two 16 year olds running the whole businesses alone even during dinner rushes.
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fugalfervor 1466 days ago
This kind of response is why I asked the question, I guess. I don't know the answer!
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irrational 1466 days ago
Most of the people who I knew that died from Covid were not old people. I literally did not know of any old people that died from it. Even my 99 year old grandmother got it and beat it (this was pre-vaccine). She said that she beat the Spanish flu in the 1920s so she would beat Covid in the 2020s, and she did.
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