Hey, Detroit fast-food employees, you sure have your priorities straight:
A local McDonald’s restaurant was forced to close after its employees walked out and hundreds gathered outside to protest for higher wages.
The restaurant on 8 Mile and Lahser roads along the Detroit/Southfield city line was just one location locally where fast food workers are participating in a nationwide “walkout for better wages.”
Over 200 protestors crowded the restaurant, carrying signs that read “We are worth more. Strike for 15,” as in $15 an hour.
Terrance Collins told WWJ’s Vickie Thomas he has worked at McDonald’s for a few years, and has been struggling ever since.
“I started off making $7.40, they gave me a manager position and raised that to $7.75. When they took my manager position, they dropped me back down to $7.40, and I have two kids to put on top of that that I’m trying to support. And the ends still doesn’t meet so no, it’s not a comfortable living,” he said.
Other employees shared Collins’ views.
Let me get this straight: you’re living in a bankrupt city, one so hard up that it is having a hard time issuing birth and death certificates, and you go on strike…for $15 an hour.
There are similar strikes going on in fifty cities across the country. But Detroit?
A higher minimum wage, by the way, causes higher unemployment, something, by the way, that is already high in Detroit. This article is a few years old but it explains this phenomenon very clearly.
If the McDonald’s in Detroit paid $15 an hour, it would likely be able to employ fewer people.
Nobody is suggesting that it is easy to live on $7.40 an hour. But a person grounded in reality, it seems, would acknowledge, ever how reluctantly, that that is better than not having a job. Or is it?