As a manager in training at the Irondequoit Wendy’s, Kim Ramos makes $8 an hour, which is New York’s minimum wage. When she advances to manager, she’ll make around $9 or $10 an hour.
But even then she says she’ll struggle to make ends meet. Ramos lives with her girlfriend, who has two children and is a manager at the same Wendy’s. If fast food corporations paid their workers better, Ramos says, her family would face less stress.
“I’d be able to pay more than one bill at a time,” she says.
Ramos, who works full time at the restaurant, was scheduled to work last Thursday. But instead, she and some of her coworkers went on a day-long strike. They also joined in a Metro Justice-organized protest in front of the Wendy’s. Fast food workers in 150 cities across the country were striking that day as part of the Fight for $15 campaign.
The campaign, which is led by social justice organizations and union organizers, is an effort to convince large fast food corporations such as McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s to commit to a $15 hourly wage for their restaurant employees. Another goal: assurances that the companies won’t retaliate if workers try to unionize.
Campaign organizers say that the restaurants reap big profits, but pay their employees — many with families — very low wages. In the Rochester metro, the average food service employee earned $9.89 an hour as of May 2013, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s an annual wage of $20,580, which is just above the federal poverty line for a family of three.
While Ramos participated in the protest, a man leaned out of a passing car and yelled that minimum wage is good enough.
“Some people are just ignorant,” Ramos said.
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2014.
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.
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.
How did you advance your career? I bet it wasn’t through protesting.
Don’t want to struggle to feed 2 children? Don’t have that second kid if your prospects are working are Wendy’s. 1 kid can be a mistake, don’t tell me the second one is too.
Remember: (1) Most fast-food workers are adults who are major breadwinners for their families; (2) had the minimum wage fifty years ago merely kept up with inflation it would be over $15 today; (3) when these giant corporations don’t pay living wages the rest of us pay Medicaid and food stamps to help these families stay out of poverty; (4) a $15 living wage puts more money into the pockets of people who will spend it, thereby creating more jobs, not fewer; (5) McDonalds, Burger King, and the rest are hugely profitable, paying their CEOs over 1,000 times what they pay their front-line workers. It’s time America’s fast-food workers got a raise. – Robert Reich
I agree with everything some of the previous commenters have said. If everyone thought like that a hundred years ago, we still wouldn’t have the weekend. And everyone knows the weekend is nothing but an excuse to not work so that someone much better off than us can enjoy the overwhelming majority of the fruits of our labor. And what’s not to like about working so that someone else can enjoy the overwhelming majority of the fruits of our labor! Hell, I’d work 8 or 9 days a week if God had given us 8 or 9 days in a week!
But it’s more than that. If everyone listened to the previous commenters, we’d enjoy even LESS labor power in this country than we already do, and that would be awesome! Just think about it – more of the nation’s wealth would accrue to those at the top, and as all social science demonstrates, this has proven time and again to be a wonderful thing for everyone! When it comes to pretty much every social indicator under the sun, from health outcomes to crime to social trust to happiness, we’re all better off when those at the top are getting richer and richer while the rest of our incomes are stagnating. What’s more, the economy grows even faster than it did before! Like I said, this is AWE-SOME.
CORRECTION: It turns out virtually everything in the above paragraph is wrong, with the exception that less labor power does indeed lead to increased inequality. Believe it or not, increased inequality tends to lead to worse health outcomes, higher crime rates, less social trust, and less happiness, not to mention a more unstable and violent society as a whole. It also leads to decreased growth. My bad.
This is perhaps one of the strangest and most unwarranted requests I may have ever heard by anyone in any profession, ever. If McDonalds/fa(s)t food employees want a wage-doubling pay increase, then this is absolutely absurd. The reason why these jobs pay so little has to do with the lack of skills required to perform the work: food comes frozen or bagged and prepped, all that is required is cutting open these bags and learning how to use a microwave properly. Many corporate, stream-lined places of business have preparation guides in multiple languages with pictures included, so that even the most illiterate employee may function in these highly organized environments. If in fact these disgruntled employees are arguing for a minimum wage increase across the board to $15, I am wondering if any of these individuals possess the capability of foresight (my personal guess is no). Raising the minimum wage by almost double would radically increase inflation. Your $4 gallon of milk would then cost around $8–and the protests would then continue.
If their argument is based on their family size and family support, this is also a heinous request. How many times has an employer asked you upon hire, “How many people are you supporting in your family? 5? Well, let’s pay you twice as much as Johnny over there who’s single.” There are many, many ways to make money–finding a new, better-paying job in the same field, finding a second job, going back to school to increase your skill-set so that your next job(s) DO indeed pay a higher wage, selling things on the internet, or creating things at home and selling them independently at a store-front, garage sale, or market. There are also dozens of ways of penny-pinching and saving money, so that your dollar stretches further: using birth control responsibly for starters (less mouths to feed!), couponing, buying foods that are not prepared (all aspects of preparation cost you more money!), and spending less money on entertainment, to name just a very few.
Am I empathetic to the plight of the poor and needy? Of course. Poverty is an ugly, multi-headed monster that effects many, many people across the nation and is no simple subject. Officially, I “live below the poverty line” myself. I can manage to survive, however, by a number of important lifestyle guidelines that assist me in financial decision-making processes. I have ample amount of savings, can pay all of my bills on time, am accept and am content with what I have as opposed to wanting what I do not, and am not begging for a pay increase when I do so little to actually deserve it–and I make the same amount as these folks do. Fancy that.
CORRECTION #2: It turns out I was wrong about that last point as well. If everyone was as self-interested, myopic, and resentful as some of the above commenters would like us to be, we’d probably all burn in a ball of endless hellfire. Again – my bad.