Fast-Food Strike Means Time to Buy Gold – Sovereign Investor

Another good article showed up in my email today. I really have a hard time keeping up with all the interesting newsletters I get. Some are free, some I pay for, I enjoy reading all of them (when I have the time). This one today is on the fast food workers strike. Funny, cause I was at a hotel in Galveston this morning after visiting a friend up there last night. I had to get up early for a job interview and get home by 0800 when it was supposed to start. So anyway, I don’t usually watch TV and especially not the news since it either gets me pissed off or depressed. This morning, they were interviewing one of the leaders of the fast food workers strike. He said they were actually ALREADY OFFERED $14/hour! They turned it down???!! This is for flipping burgers! Basically a low skilled, entry level job. The TV interviewer also mentioned that they wanted to interview more people for the show but they could only find 2 (!) that spoke English and so they had a major issue with communication. The strikers reasoning was that “they can afford it”. Well, yeah, they probably can afford it (especially if they are not going to pay their CEO and other bigwigs multi-million dollar salaries), but what else goes into the cost of labor at these places other than just salary? Do they get ANY benefits?? Training? Uniforms? Discounts? I don’t know, I’ve never worked in a fast food place. I did work in a small family owned restaurant as a dishwasher when I was a kid, I worked at a place in the mall that sold hot dogs when I first moved to Texas, I worked occasionally as a bartender when I couldn’t get offshore for whatever reason. That is my entire experience with that kind of work. I also worked as a head housekeeper at a big resort which didn’t pay much either even tho it was a supervisory position. I was able to survive on those low wages. I accepted the fact that my skills were not worth much to my employer and that when I learned to be more useful, I would be able to work my way up and earn more money (which I did). So, can somebody please explain to me why the people who work that kind of job should be able to demand that kind of money? Why don’t they just go find another job that pays better, has more benefits, whatever? Remember, this was HOUSTON where they were doing the TV interview I saw. Houston is in another of its periodic booms at the moment. There are all kinds of places crying for workers, especially offshore, where they DO pay good money, even for relatively unskilled labor. I just don’t get it, what do they think they’re going to accomplish? They get more pay and everybody else will too, and EVERYTHING will go up in price as well, its called inflation! The laws of unintended consequences are bound to strike here and the strikers will be worse off than they are now (along with the rest of us).