Fast food workers in more than 60 cities decided to strike on Friday.
Many corporate chains, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King, saw workers set up a picket line to promote a $15-an-hour minimum wage as well as the right to unionize.
At a glance, it would appear the strike is a legitimate concern on behalf of the workers to push for increased wages.
However, with the looming healthcare registration, trying to raise the minimum wage would be a two-pronged blow to businesses everywhere.
With a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, many Americans are feeling the pinch of underemployment. In short, there are too few minimum wage jobs for the amount of people applying.
Visa Inc. released a chart designed to teach McDonald’s employees how to live on minimum wage, and the chart clearly shows the corporate disconnect from the top.
The figures provided by Visa included $600 in rent, $0 in heating costs and $20 in monthly health insurance costs.
These figures also account for the prospective worker to have a second job, which at $7.25 an hour would amount to 74 hours a week, according to the monthly total of income earned in the chart.
The average McDonald’s worker at an entry level position would have to work approximately one million hours to match the compensation package of former McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner, according to Bloomberg.
With this difference in pay scale, the argument to raise the wages earned by entry level fast food workers is compelling.
On the other hand, with the changes coming in the Affordable Care Act, the push to increase living wages comes at an awkward time as businesses frantically try to include the added costs of providing health care to its employees.
According to NBC News, Delta Airlines will pay out more than $100 million to provide health care for its employees in 2014.
As companies continue to feel the sluggish economic recovery, the question remains of whether the added costs to health care will break the fragile economic recovery and create another recession.
While it’s understandable that many fast food workers want to see their wages doubled, increasing the wages when the economy is slowly returning to pre-recession levels may be ill-advised.
The added burden of including comprehensive health care coverage for millions of Americans will lead to even more struggle in the economy.
Still, this doesn’t mean that the low wages fast food workers face should go unaddressed.
One area that corporations could look to to provide savings is to reduce the amount of profits earned by shareholders rather than workers.
As shareholders bear virtually no duty in the day-to-day management of running the corporation, compensation should be diverted more to workers.
Nicolas Rodriguez is a senior political science major and an assistant opinions editor at the Daily 49er.