| Title | Burger King and McDonald's Pay Fast Food Workers $20/Hour in Denmark | |
| Date | Wednesday October 29 2014, @12:55PM | |
| Author | n1 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dreaming-of-a-living-wage dept. | ||
AlterNet reports:
Imagine a world where fast food workers can pay their rent and utility bills plus buy their children food and clothes. Well, you don't have to imagine it because such a place exists. It's called Denmark.
A New York Times article on Tuesday (paywalled) chronicled the life of a Danish fast food worker named Hampus Elofsson, who works 40 hours a week at a Burger King in Copenhagen, and makes enough not only to pay his bills, but to save some money and enjoy a night out with friends. His wage: $20 per hour. Yep, you read that right. The base wage in Denmark is close to two and a half times what American fast food workers make.
Elofsson's pay is the kind of wage that Anthony Moore, a shift manager in Tampa, Florida can only dream about. [Moore] earns $9 an hour for his low-level management job, or about $300 per week, and like half of America's fast food workers, he relies on some form of public assistance to make up the difference between that wage and barely eking out a living.
[...] What Danish fast food workers have that their American counterparts do not is a powerful union and fast food franchise owners who are willing to make a little less of a profit...though they still do make a profit.
Economics professor Richard Wolff talked about Denmark in a webcast (20MB MP3) back in July.
I also found his discussion of the "recovery" of the USA economy (between the segment on the GM bailout and the one on "US" megacorps evading taxes) to be especially worthwhile. His weekly webcasts are also available for about half the bandwidth and storage space from KPFA's archive.
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printed from SoylentNews, Burger King and McDonald's Pay Fast Food Workers $20/Hour in Denmark on 2024-04-24 22:19:33