McDonald’s announced that it will be raising its employees’ wages at 650 of its stores that are owned by the company in the United States in an effort to bring on additional workers.
The Associated Press reported that the fast-food chain is also encouraging those who own franchises to increase workers’ wages. Franchisees of the company reportedly compose 95% of its restaurant base.
Other food chains including Chipotle, which said Monday that it will increase employees’ pay to an average of $15 per hour by the end of June, have raised wages in recent months. Darden Restaurants, the owner of Olive Garden and other chains, said earlier this year that it will give workers $12 per hour including tips by 2023. Amazon, Costco, and other big companies have also said they will increase pay in recent weeks, per the outlet.
As The Daily Wire reported last month, Chipotle previously said that it might need to increase the prices of its menu options if there is a mandatory increase to the minimum wage.
According to Business Insider, Jack Hartung, Chipotle’s CFO, spoke of the effect of a $15 minimum wage during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “He said hourly employees’ average minimum wage is about $13 per hour, while Glassdoor indicated that a starting hourly wage at Chipotle is about $11,” the outlet reported.
“We’re not that far off of, for example, a $15 number. But let’s say, for example, that there’s going to be an across-the-board 10% increase in our wages,” Hartung said. “And that would, to offset that with menu pricing, take us 2% to 3% price increase,” he explained.
McDonald’s said Thursday that its hourly wages will go up an average of 10% over the next couple of months to $13 per hour, increasing to $15 per hour by 2024. Workers at the entry level will earn at least $11 per hour, while employees with higher-level roles, such as shift managers, will earn at least $15 per hour.
Fight for $15 and a Union, a labor group that is attempting to unionize fast-food employees, said McDonald’s corporate’s changes aren’t enough.
“We’ve showed up to work day after day in the middle of a global pandemic, risking our lives without proper P.P.E. or paid time off to keep your stores open and corporate profits flowing,” Doneshia Babbitt, a McDonald’s employee, and union leader said in a statement. “You’ve called us essential for over a year, but your announcement today proves that you’ve seen us as disposable all along.”
The move comes as businesses fight to get workers in the door after many employees are potentially opting to stay home as they receive unemployment funding from the government.
As The Daily Wire reported, President Joe Biden has repeatedly received bad economic news over the last week starting with the disastrous jobs report on Friday and soaring inflation rates on Wednesday.
The Daily Wire reported:
The black unemployment rate increased, 18,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, no construction jobs were added, unemployment for Americans without any college education increased, and women had a net loss in jobs in the report that was released on Friday. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that nearly 10 million Americans, 9.8 million to be exact, remained unemployed in Biden’s economy. The April jobs report missed projections for the number of new jobs expected by more than 700,000 jobs.
Restaurant chains are making adjustments to their wages as lawmakers have tried to increase the minimum wage across the country over the past several months. Last month, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to raise the minimum wage to $15 for federal contractors and expanded a previous Obama-era executive order to apply the minimum wage to tipped employees working on federal contracts.
As reported by The Daily Wire, conservatives have pushed back on raising the minimum wage to $15, citing it as a move that will ultimately harm workers and businesses.
Daily Wire’s Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro’s “Debunked” piece explained the $15 minimum wage. Shapiro discussed Thomas Sowell’s concept that the true minimum wage is zero, not what the government says the minimum wage is, due to the fact that artificially raising the minimum wage can put people out of work and minimize the jobs that are available.
Shapiro wrote, “The Congressional Budget Office recently evaluated Joe Biden’s plan for a $15 federal minimum wage, and what they found is that over the course of the next few years, it would improve the salaries for some 900,000 people, but it would put 1.4 million people out of work.”
Jobs that pay a minimum wage are also often the first job that a person takes when they are getting started in life. As Shapiro noted, “A quarter of minimum wage workers are under the age of 25. In fact, 8% of all teenagers are working for minimum wage.”
These jobs typically lead to other jobs and provide a pathway for people to improve their quality of life. Conservatives point to a forced minimum wage as a policy that will directly result in fewer beginner jobs for people, which ultimately harms businesses and their employees.