fast food employees being fired over minimum wage laws could actually work out in favor of the working class
The markup on fast food is crazy and the wages are dirt cheap. You’re talking about a 380% markup on the typical burger. Far more often than not, the challenge fast food chains have is keeping experienced workers on staff without paying them market rates. That periodically means firing some staff members to intimidate the remainder.
If that’s the case, then I agree with paying them a lot more, but making the job expectations match. If you pay a lot for an easy job with low expectations, then you’ll get a lot of people who don’t take the job seriously. I agree that they should be payed a lot to maintain the employment of experienced workers, but the flip side to that is the people who don’t perform should be shown the door.
I completely agree that if companies give shit wages, they shouldn’t expect employee retention.
Given that the worst-paying jobs are often the most physically onerous and time consuming… I’m fine with making the pay better AND the job easier.
If you pay a lot for an easy job with low expectations
Service sector jobs tend to be monotonous, exhausting, and periodically quite hazardous. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent an eight hour shift on your feet in front of a deep fryer filling orders as fast as possible, but it isn’t easy and the patrons particularly forgiving.
the flip side to that is the people who don’t perform should be shown the door
Performance metric employment is a dicey business. There’s a number of famous managerial cases of businesses destroying themselves with this approach, most notably when Ed Lampert ran the Sears department store into the ground ten years ago.
But the consensus among the business press and dozens of very bitter former executives is that the overriding cause of Sears’s malaise is the disastrous decision by the company’s chairman and CEO, Edward Lampert, to disaggregate the company’s different divisions into competing units: to create an internal market.
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Executives would attach screen protectors to their laptops at meetings to prevent their colleagues from finding out what they were up to. Units would scrap over floor and shelf space for their products. Screaming matches between the chief marketing officers of the different divisions were common at meetings intended to agree on the content of the crucial weekly circular advertising specials. They would fight over key positioning, aiming to optimize their own unit’s profits, even at another unit’s expense, sometimes with grimly hilarious result. Kimes describes screwdrivers being advertised next to lingerie, and how the sporting goods division succeeded in getting the Doodle Bug mini-bike for young boys placed on the cover of the Mothers’ Day edition of the circular. As for different divisions swallowing lower profits, or losses, on discounted goods in order to attract customers for other items, forget about it. One executive quoted in the Bloomberg investigation described the situation as “dysfunctionality at the highest level.”
As profits collapsed, the divisions grew increasingly vicious toward each other, scrapping over what cash reserves remained. Squeezing profits still further was the duplication in labor, particularly with an increasingly top-heavy repetition of executive function by the now-competing units, which no longer had an interest in sharing costs for shared opera- tions. With no company-wide interest in maintaining store infrastructure, something instead viewed as an externally imposed cost by each division, Sears’s capital expenditure dwindled to less than 1 percent of revenue, a proportion much lower than that of most other retailers.
Ultimately, the different units decided to simply take care of their own profits, the company as a whole be damned. One former executive, Shaunak Dave, described a culture of “warring tribes,” and an elimination of cooperation and collaboration. One business press wag described Lampert’s regime as “running Sears like the Coliseum.” Kimes, for her part, wrote that if there were any book to which the model conformed, it was less Atlas Shrugged than it was The Hunger Games.
A well-run athletics program does not, traditionally, pit athletes against one another and deliver outsized rewards to the handful of “star” players. They reward teamwork and comradrie, temper expectations to the anticipated limits of team members, and seek to maximize the function of the whole rather than measuring exclusively by the individual parts.
That way leads to infighting, division, and self-destruction.
I agree that teamwork is important in a company, which is harmed by people who are continually lazy. Everyone needs to work together but at the same time, people who regularly go above and beyond need to be rewarded. There’s much less envy of success when people feel like it was earned or it’s something they could achieve if they worked hard. On a sports team, anyone who can’t perform is let go.
There’s an old well-defined business principle called the 80/20 principle. 80% of the outcomes are driven by 20% of the causes. Going on a witch hunt for the one lazy employee is an enormous waste of effort, relative to simply guaranteeing a smooth and efficient workflow for the general staff. If the workplace is well-run, staff can be both lazy and productive. If everything is difficult and adversarial, even the most productive workers will fail to hit their marks.
There’s much less envy of success when people feel like it was earned or it’s something they could achieve if they worked hard.
People don’t envy success, they envy a disparity of results. Splitting your team arbitrarily into “Makers” and “Takers”, because one staffer outperforms another on a particular day or in a particular scale doesn’t encourage cohesion. It encourages backstabbing and animosity. Trying to pay people for individual performance in a team environment means you’re going to get a bunch of people fighting with one another to be First Place, rather than helping each other to hit a team goal.
Again, look to the Sears model and its failures. Compare that to, say, HEB where the whole store is rewarded when it hits a mark regardless of whether any single staffer falls above or below the pack.
On a sports team, anyone who can’t perform is let go.
There’s a lot of drama around athlete contracts regarding performance. But savvy agents know to include injury clauses that protect their players. That’s because the financial demand is to cut the player loose after injury, but the team demand is for the player to take risks in order to win the game.
You don’t want a situation like when the Longhorns played the Crimson Tide back in 2009, with star quarterback Colt McCoy just sitting his ass down at the start of the game in order to avoid injuries into his professional career.
The markup on fast food is crazy and the wages are dirt cheap. You’re talking about a 380% markup on the typical burger. Far more often than not, the challenge fast food chains have is keeping experienced workers on staff without paying them market rates. That periodically means firing some staff members to intimidate the remainder.
If that’s the case, then I agree with paying them a lot more, but making the job expectations match. If you pay a lot for an easy job with low expectations, then you’ll get a lot of people who don’t take the job seriously. I agree that they should be payed a lot to maintain the employment of experienced workers, but the flip side to that is the people who don’t perform should be shown the door.
I completely agree that if companies give shit wages, they shouldn’t expect employee retention.
Given that the worst-paying jobs are often the most physically onerous and time consuming… I’m fine with making the pay better AND the job easier.
Service sector jobs tend to be monotonous, exhausting, and periodically quite hazardous. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent an eight hour shift on your feet in front of a deep fryer filling orders as fast as possible, but it isn’t easy and the patrons particularly forgiving.
Performance metric employment is a dicey business. There’s a number of famous managerial cases of businesses destroying themselves with this approach, most notably when Ed Lampert ran the Sears department store into the ground ten years ago.
…
A well-run athletics program does not, traditionally, pit athletes against one another and deliver outsized rewards to the handful of “star” players. They reward teamwork and comradrie, temper expectations to the anticipated limits of team members, and seek to maximize the function of the whole rather than measuring exclusively by the individual parts.
That way leads to infighting, division, and self-destruction.
I agree that teamwork is important in a company, which is harmed by people who are continually lazy. Everyone needs to work together but at the same time, people who regularly go above and beyond need to be rewarded. There’s much less envy of success when people feel like it was earned or it’s something they could achieve if they worked hard. On a sports team, anyone who can’t perform is let go.
There’s an old well-defined business principle called the 80/20 principle. 80% of the outcomes are driven by 20% of the causes. Going on a witch hunt for the one lazy employee is an enormous waste of effort, relative to simply guaranteeing a smooth and efficient workflow for the general staff. If the workplace is well-run, staff can be both lazy and productive. If everything is difficult and adversarial, even the most productive workers will fail to hit their marks.
People don’t envy success, they envy a disparity of results. Splitting your team arbitrarily into “Makers” and “Takers”, because one staffer outperforms another on a particular day or in a particular scale doesn’t encourage cohesion. It encourages backstabbing and animosity. Trying to pay people for individual performance in a team environment means you’re going to get a bunch of people fighting with one another to be First Place, rather than helping each other to hit a team goal.
Again, look to the Sears model and its failures. Compare that to, say, HEB where the whole store is rewarded when it hits a mark regardless of whether any single staffer falls above or below the pack.
There’s a lot of drama around athlete contracts regarding performance. But savvy agents know to include injury clauses that protect their players. That’s because the financial demand is to cut the player loose after injury, but the team demand is for the player to take risks in order to win the game.
You don’t want a situation like when the Longhorns played the Crimson Tide back in 2009, with star quarterback Colt McCoy just sitting his ass down at the start of the game in order to avoid injuries into his professional career.