{"id":53975,"date":"2013-07-29T06:54:13","date_gmt":"2013-07-29T05:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/mcdonalds-tells-workers-to-toil-70-hours-a-week-use-ripoff-payroll-cards-as-part-of-financial-literacy\/53975\/"},"modified":"2013-07-29T06:54:13","modified_gmt":"2013-07-29T05:54:13","slug":"mcdonalds-tells-workers-to-toil-70-hours-a-week-use-ripoff-payroll-cards-as-part-of-financial-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/mcdonalds-tells-workers-to-toil-70-hours-a-week-use-ripoff-payroll-cards-as-part-of-financial-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"McDonalds Tells Workers to Toil 70 Hours a Week, Use Ripoff Payroll Cards as Part of "Financial Literacy""},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mcdonalds(Photo: Messercn<\/a>)<\/span><\/span>Think the world needs an alternative to corporate media? Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout and keep independent journalism strong.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The poor have to endure not just the indignity of struggling to survive, but also from having to listen to pious lectures on how they really can proper on their meager incomes.<\/p>\n

The McDonalds\/Visa\/\u201dWealth Watchers<\/a>\u201d version of this \u201clet them eat cake\u201d comes in the form<\/span> of a website<\/a> that drives home the message that if low wage workers like McDonalds employees just mustered up enough budget discipline, they can achieve \u201cfinancial freedom\u201d. The use of math, one imagines, is intended to make the advice seem objective rather than cynical and self serving. ThinkProgress, which pounced<\/a> on this spreadsheet<\/a>, pointed out how unattainable this sanitized, prettily-formatted elite fantasy is.<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/p>\n

Now it\u2019s not hard to notice that these lovely patronizers anticipate, in a super duper high unemployment economy, that the industrious budget-preparer will have TWO jobs. And how much time might that entail?<\/p>\n

Wellie, the spreadsheet starts from after-tax dollars. Using current employee FICA payments of 6.2% and the 2012 Federal tax tables, and assuming this is a single worker who takes the personal exemption and standard deduction and pays no state income tax, this worker gets roughly $28,950 in pre-tax income. ThinkProgress tells us that McDonalds pay \u201caverages\u201d $8.25. I\u2019m not sure where they got that, since other reports (Glassdoor) show McDonalds\u2019 jobs postings paying well under $8, and a Bloomberg story recounted how a 20 veteran was still getting only minimum wage in Chicago\u2026which is $8.25. So we\u2019ll used $8.25 even though this looks like creative accounting from McDonalds\u2019 PR department.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ll assume our laborer making $28,950 in gross pay works 50 weeks a year. Divided by $8.25, that\u2019s 70.2 hours a week, or more than 10 hours every day.<\/p>\n

Now you can clearly see how the expense side is equally unrealistic. Remember, it\u2019s politically important to show that even low income workers can save, so notice how \u201csavings\u201d is the first \u201cexpense\u201d. Notice also that is shows $20 a month in health \u201cinsurance\u201d. Funny, McDonalds\u2019 own health plan, which is meager (don\u2019t get seriously ill, the maximum payment<\/span> in a year is $10,000) and only some of its full time workers are eligible, costs $14 a week. $14 x 4.5 weeks a month = $63. So McDonalds can\u2019t even make its own bare bones program work in this fairy tale budget. But those poor folks get their bread and circuses in the form of $100 for phone and cable. Needless to say, $600 a month won\u2019t get you far in the rent category in a lot of major cities either. And how are you going to be able to hold down those two jobs if you live out far enough to have cheap rent but you have to spend a lot of time commuting?<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s look at what is left. That $25 a day is supposed to cover food, gas, clothes, shoes, laundry, cleaning and personal care products, medication (OTC and prescription co-pays, which will be large given how cheap the medical plan is), dental treatments (no way does a $20 a month plan include dental), entertainment<\/span>, and any travel to see family or friends.<\/p>\n

Now the site tells you how to meet these goals:<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/p>\n

So someone who is exhausted and time stressed is exhorted to use public transportation (they probably have to but presenting necessity as a virtue is patronizing).<\/p>\n

And if they are working two jobs, how likely is it that they can maintain enough in the way of personal relationship to find someone to carpool with, even before we get to the odds of having schedules mesh? And of course, the low income person is supposed to be able to cook and plan.<\/p>\n

The piece de resistance<\/em>, however, is that this site pushes payroll cards:<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/p>\n

Even though McDonalds was embarrassed by ThinkProgress into acknowledging that its employees who own homes might need to pay for heat, it\u2019s apparently not backing down on the use of payroll cards that are being examined by Federal and state prosecutors for possible violations of minimum wage<\/a> and consumer protection laws<\/a>. A Consumer Reports study from 2012<\/a> looked at a large sample of these cards and found that workers were likely to incur $10 to $30 in monthly charges, with $15 to $25 typical.<\/p>\n

In other words, low income workers must strenuously avoid doing everything Big Money and Big Food and Big Retail are trying to get you to do through multibillion public relations and marketing campaigns, and use as many of the public services that these same firms are in the process of destroying.<\/p>\n

But with all this, the claim is that \u201cYou can have almost anything you want as long as you plan ahead and save for it.\u201d See what nice well scrubbed healthy looking people are promoting this-budget-your-way-to-virtue theology:<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/p>\n

And look how easy renting an apartment is, according to link that takes you to Visa (well except for the creepy and aggressive hawking of credit reports<\/span>):<\/p>\n

\"2013<\/p>\n

It might help if we leave the Orwellian \u201cWealth Watchers<\/a>\u201d version of a McDonalds worker\u2019s financial prospects and look at the reality. From Bloomberg last December<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Tyree Johnson scrubs himself with a bar of soap in a McDonald\u2019s (MCD) bathroom and puts on fresh deodorant. He stashes his toiletries in a Kenneth Cole bag, a gift from his mother who works the counter at Macy\u2019s, and hops on an El train. His destination: another McDonald\u2019s\u2026<\/p>\n

He needs the makeshift baths because hygiene and appearance are part of his annual compensation reviews. Even with frequent scrubbings, he said before a recent shift, it\u2019s hard to remove the essence of the greasy food he works around\u2026<\/p>\n

Johnson, 44, needs the two paychecks to pay rent for his apartment at a single-room occupancy hotel on the city\u2019s north side. While he\u2019s worked at McDonald\u2019s stores for two decades, he still doesn\u2019t get 40 hours a week and makes $8.25 an hour, minimum wage in Illinois\u2026<\/p>\n

Johnson begins most days the same way: picking cigarette butts out of the shower drain of a shared bathroom, using a tissue so he doesn\u2019t touch them. While there\u2019s a \u201cNo Smoking\u201d sign posted inside the hotel where he lives, that doesn\u2019t stop the other occupants who share the showers, sinks and toilets.<\/p>\n

His rent at the hotel in Chicago\u2019s Uptown neighborhood is $320 a month. Johnson usually can\u2019t cover it all at once, so he\u2019s allowed to pay $160 every two weeks, or even $80 a week, for his first-floor room. He\u2019s late on November rent and owes about $100 \u2013 some of it a late-payment fee, he said. Since falling behind, he\u2019s put off buying a Dell laptop for $99 that he found online.<\/p>\n

\u201cForget about that computer,\u201d Johnson said. For now, he\u2019ll keep going to a local Apple store when he wants to update his Facebook page in his efforts to find someone nice to date and to stay in touch with his father.<\/p>\n

A pay stub of Johnson\u2019s shows that he earned $8,518.80 through Sept. 9 this year at the store that gives him most of his hours. He was able to work only 52 hours during the two- week pay period ending that date because the restaurant<\/span> was being remodeled, he said. A statement of earnings from his other McDonald\u2019s job shows that he worked fewer than 12 hours over two weeks, earning $95.45 before taxes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And his early efforts to better himself didn\u2019t help. Johnson took out a student loan in 1987 right after high school to take a six month course and get a computer certification. He was able to finish paying off the loan only a couple of months ago.<\/p>\n

So the message of the well-off to the struggling is work long hours at grossly underpaid jobs, when those \u201clong hours\u201d can\u2019t even be cobbled together in this crappy economy, and then work really hard the rest of the time to stretch your meager earnings as far as humanely possible. This is just a prettied-up version of Dickensian sweatshops. The working conditions and hours are somewhat less grinding and we now have more varied forms of cheap entertainment, but the underlying premise is similar: the elites prefer a savage, mercenary version of capitalism to the less ruthless one that labor was able to win out of its protracted, hard-fought battles. The resulting coarsening of social relationships and a waste of human potential are costs the top brass seem only too happy to incur.<\/p>\n

Republished from: Truth Out<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Photo: Messercn)Think the world needs an alternative to corporate media? Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout and keep independent journalism strong. The poor have to endure not just the indignity of struggling to survive, but also from having to listen to pious lectures on how they really can proper on their meager […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-53975","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}