I am the guy that has been ripping down all the nonsense "fight for 15" posters. As a trained professional chef of 12 years, I find the suggestion that fast food employees deserve 15 dollars an hour offensive and laughable. I also have 2 younger brothers who are chefs in Olympia, WA. They as well find this irritating, but they are more understanding, because Seattle is a very costly city. Rochester is not. I have worked in 1 industry for 12 years and went to school to do so. I am classically trained and my passion for the industry is certainly more than that of the fast food employee, because its impossible to have passion for stamped out crap. Seattle made the change in minimum wage because the cost of living is ridiculous, and requires such. Comparatively, Rochester is pretty cheap. I have lived and worked in Austin, Seattle and Los Angeles and I am from San Francisco; real cities with real restaurants where you have to drive somewhere else to even find a Wendy's and are lucky to be able to afford rent as a CEO, let alone food employee. I have worked my way up the ladder for 12 long years under some of the best chefs in our nation and I am very good at what I do. I do not make 15 dollars an hour. To be clear, I work in a restaurant at which the average bill per table is $250- $300 and my position is far above that of the fast food manager. The hubris of these fast food employees to feel that their time is worth more than trained professionals who have given everything to the side of this industry that actually matters, makes me nauseous. If Seattle hadn't raised the minimum wage, these over-entitled cattle wouldn't feel they deserve more money. If you want more money, get a real job. Wendy's is a multimillion dollar a year corporation, so I get that you think you have a right to more of that money and you absolutely do, but as a chef and manager of many years( I also managed a Red Lobster for two years. Still only got 42,000), I agree that you should make more than 8 bucks, but the middle ground is closer to 11 (Starting pay at Cheesecake Factory, Applebees, Outback, and similar corporate casual dining establishments). You work in fast food. This makes you the lowest common denominator in the eyes of cooks, chefs, servers, bussers, expeditors, dishwashers, customers and pretty much the entire working world. Get over yourselves. You don't have any actual experience (your irrelevant degrees don't matter.) or real hard work to do. When's the last time you had to write a menu and figure out what it costs? How often do you have to deal with food writers and critics? How many over qualified, highly trained staff do you have to manage? You have to manage people with no work ethic in an establishment with no integrity. Bummer. The fast food industry does not lend itself to creative people with free thoughts and a sense of individualism and passion in their work. This is why it pays crap. If you are that person, get out of fast food. What we in the real restaurants do is worth far more than you fast food zombies and we don't get the wage you foolishly think you are worth. Yes you people deserve better pay, but do not condescend to think that the 8 hours a day (with breaks and benefits) you spend managing a cookie cutter operation at all trumps the 12-18 hours a day REAL RESTAURANT STAFF spend doing ACTUAL WORK for less than 15 an hour, rare breaks, and not great benefits. the reason they pay you less is because you get vacation time, 401k options, and bennies. Harris Corp pays 16 and all the fringes. And they handle the bulk of telecommunications for the US military. If you want more money, get a real job. Your McJob will not ever pay what you think you are worth which is why we career minded people will always rally against your stupidity. Put it this way: If we don't pay our teachers $15/h. why the heck do you think you deserve that?? Learn a trade or apply at a real restaurant if you think you are worth more. It isn't the government's fault you don't have enough ambition, skills, training, or education to find a job that challenges and fulfills you while paying you what you so very mistakenly think you are with. Most REAL restaurants start at $10/H. It is your own darn fault you chose the wrong career. Stop begging.
Re: “Fast food fight for $15”
To be more clear and hopefully provide a bit of perspective, I am am a salaried food service employee and make less than 40,000 a year. I also work 70-85 hours a week, which puts my hourly rate around $7-$9 an hour. I attended a specialized culinary academy for which I am still paying bills, I have a few more years alimony payments to someone who never loved me, 3/4 financial responsibility for the household my partner and I have built, and 2 kitties that seem to always have an issue that costs money. When we can we squirrel away whatever leftover scraps of money we might have at the end of a month, and put it toward our savings to purchase a house.
I have worked long and hard to get were I am, and now that I am here I see that I get to work longer and harder. There are alot of people who would love to have a job at all, who would work harder and whine less and be generally stoked to have honest work, so the lack of gratitude coupled with the self importance and entitlement in this campaign is astonishing.
And as for the 'strike', feeble attempts to unionize won't go over well. Food worker unions are a fairly young concept and mostly west coast based as far as I know, so I doubt fast food worker unions would take off too quickly if they even left the ground. Fast food establishments are mostly staffed by the comfortably mediocre, summer school candidates, parolees, and teen moms. Not typically thought of as unionizing people. Anyway, corporate employees striking and unionizing is the reason the scabs exists in the first place. Except now they aren't called scabs. They're called hard working Americans (though, usually hopefuls) who have families to support and don't care about your arbitrary politicking, so long as they can feel confident that they will be bringing home a check to the family for whom they even bother going to work. but by all means, lets pay idiots more to stand around than we pay skilled tradespeople to be skilled at their trades.