These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
When I was rallying for a higher minimum wage and was challenged on it driving up costs, I made it abundantly clear that would only be the outcome if the corporate leadership refused to budge on their compensation and shareholder reward schemes - which, surprising nobody, is exactly what they did, and this was the entirely expected outcome.
We’ve tried being nice about this and attempting to reach a compromise in long, gradual, sustainable changes to the economy so everyone can benefit from its improvements in efficiency and scale, but the grim reality is that said compromises are no longer on the table, and harms are inevitable. With no more room to squeeze workers, it should be of no surprise that a growing plurality are demanding immediate and substantial change instead of piecemeal reform - and Capital has every right to be terrified of an angry labor class.
Looking at McDonald's finances would have made the article better. And it mentioned their claims about labor costs. But it cited analysis which contradicted those claims.
No problem stands alone in a vacuum, and nothing at this point has “one easy fix”. These articles that try to paint higher wages or corporate consolidation as the sole reason for complex and nuanced issues aren’t just toxic to discourse around addressing these problems, they also collectively dumb down people into the debate equivalent of sports teams with no room for other positions.
The entire piece reads as a sympathy puff article to paint McDonalds in a “woe is us, our business dictates we raise prices to only serve the wealthy” posture, which is insincere at best, and almost certainly shit journalism.
McDonalds is just a real estate investment trust that happens to sell hamburgers. The business model is ‘rent high value land for a profit while racking up unrealized gains on the land and ensure a steady stream of rents by selling franchisees supplies that they can sell to make sure they can pay their rent.’ Take a look at the sorts of parcels McDonalds acquires, usually multiple acres in busy commercial areas.
In an ideal world, they’d be a restaurant company, but it’s just a real estate company with extra steps.
This has been the story in the US for a few decades now. You can’t have nice things that other developed countries take as a given like higher lineage, healthcare, higher education, public infrastructure, etc because of profit, exec compensation, stock buybacks and all the rest.
> These articles deliberately skew reality to fit an anti-worker narrative. All the focus is on costs of labor and materials, with not one single sentence devoted to McDonald’s own financials - like the growth of their margins, the share buybacks performed, the executive compensation, or the franchising model itself.
Capital will always blame Labor for their problems
Or you could not jump to completely inaccurate conclusions about someone’s viewpoints, movement participation, and policy positions based solely on one comment on a single post. You could ask questions for clarity, or challenge specific assertions, instead of leaping directly to bad faith arguments (“why don’t YOU take a pay cut?” maybe because I’m not a CEO with a compensation package in the millions of dollars a year?) to support a pre-supposed conclusion you refuse to waver from.
C’mon, ya’ll, I expected better from HN commenters. This is arguably the worst thread I’ve been in with regards to the quality of discourse.
I mean this nicely: I would really not expect much better from HN. This is ground zero for Capital's public social media discourse; I'm actually quite surprised your top-level comment hasn't been downvoted to oblivion or even flagged, since you dared to utter the unutterable: that workers deserve more and Capital deserves less. I'm with you, friend, but be careful here.
When I was rallying for a higher minimum wage and was challenged on it driving up costs, I made it abundantly clear that would only be the outcome if the corporate leadership refused to budge on their compensation and shareholder reward schemes - which, surprising nobody, is exactly what they did, and this was the entirely expected outcome.
We’ve tried being nice about this and attempting to reach a compromise in long, gradual, sustainable changes to the economy so everyone can benefit from its improvements in efficiency and scale, but the grim reality is that said compromises are no longer on the table, and harms are inevitable. With no more room to squeeze workers, it should be of no surprise that a growing plurality are demanding immediate and substantial change instead of piecemeal reform - and Capital has every right to be terrified of an angry labor class.