Buying burger-flippers
John Howard is right to say that we should not “sneer at young Australians who work for Hungry Jack’s”. But he’d do well to explain why the Commonwealth is subsidising these jobs under a scheme that was designed to boost trade apprenticeships. I wasn’t aware that burger flippers were so hard to find, or that their special skills need public funding.
How New Right of you, Robert!
Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.
I should also note that HJs, McDs and the like already benefit from discriminatory junior wages that were explicitly excluded from Howard’s anti-age discrimination legislation. So they’re effectively getting a subsidy to hire people that already get paid less for equal work. Absolutely outrageous.
(You are absolutely correct, by the way.)
Er, ok, we’re doing the simul-post thing. My inital comment was drawing attention to your free-market instincts in insisting that corporate welfare was inappropriate, a position that I would associate with the economic right.
Okay, I see what you mean.
corporate welfare was inappropriate, a position that I would associate with the economic right.
If only the economic right actually believed that…
Touche, gjw.
And Rob, you’re being a bit soft on the fast-food multinationals (as is your comrade Jenny Macklin, in the above-linked story): “I think they train their workers well”.
Training in/for *what*? Working in a limited-menu kitchen, plus customer service that consists solely of forced smiles and uttering that immortal line about “fries with that”. Oh, and if you make it to the ranks of management, training in ludicrous hyperbole 101 also apparently becomes compulsory:
“McDonald’s managing director Tim Tighe . . . warn[ed] employers were crying out for the skills that graduates of the fast-food industry could deliver”.
Quite apart from everything else, since when does being sacked on one’s 18th birthday make one a “graduate” of anything? Tighe is cynically stealing words from the language of education.
Likewise, in today’s hardcopy Oz, an accompanying story has this gem:
‘”It’s not just customer service and food-preparation. This is cross-training’. [Hungry Jacks training consultant, Candice] Zaidel says”.
Whatever Zaidel herself is a graduate/”graduate” of, meaningless re-combinations of sentences just uttered was clearly its special forte.
Huh? When I said burger flippers had “special skills,” I was being sarcastic. Both of my brothers worked or work for KFC. I’m well aware that there’s not a lot of actual training going along.
If they do half the level of heavy lifting that I had to do at Macca’s when I was 15, they’ll double in weight and develop Schwarzenegger shoulders. That was my favourite task,
“before you go home, clock off and unload the truck”.
Mmmm. Unpaid overtime.
I worked at an (unspecified) Shop that sold Cheesecake, and they used to take advantage of the traineeship thing to both get money from government and reduce the poor trainee’s wages, and then the poor worker continued to do the same job she always had. But for a below poverty-level pittance (seriously – $5.50 an hour). I guess that’s what we can all look forward to under Howard’s Senate.
I can beat that—in 1995-96 I was paid $5.07 an hour. For dirty, nasty, heavy lifting work I wouldn’t ask a fucking gym-going weight-lifting obsessive to do.
McDonalds Australia: listen up. Your franchisees are rorting your workers.
Rob,
Granted that you make your opposition to fast-food multinationals’ exploitative practises quite clear overall. By “being a bit soft on [them]” I was referring to your opening sentence: “John Howard is right to say that we should not ’sneer at young Australians who work for Hungry Jacks’”.
Who’s sneering at them, seriously? It sure as hell ain’t the Left — which not only champions full employment (a job for everyone who wants one), but would like to see, as indeed you point out, hefty wages rises for them, through the introduction of equal pay for equal work by young employees, instead of the current discriminatory system.
By letting John Howard’s demonstratively false premise into your argument — however fleetingly — you commit the common Labor policy error of losing control of the debate. Therefore, you say you agree with the PM, instead of demolishing his conceit. Pointedly,
Jenny Macklin adopts the same tactics — so omitting to attack corporate welfare at the very time such an offensive is called for. Labor’s response to the Tampa incident in 2001 is perhaps the best-known, and the most shameful, example of all.
As long as Labor keeps up this gutless game — of being too scared or too incompetent to challenge outrageous statements made by the government, so always ending up uttering qualified endorsements of government policy — it will be permanently unelectable federally.
Oh, I see what you’re saying. I don’t think anyone is sneering at them (which is why John Howard is right — nobody could seriously disagree and argue that we should sneer at them), but I didn’t make that clear enough.
I think ferret features should give more support to small business and offer employment diversity courses for high school and uni students so that they can see there is something more available for them and for them to offer to their communities than plastic crap food that comes from a concrete box with a smoke stack, that pays crap as well.
Poor kids. [poor adults as well]
I’m not so sure that some pimply-faced kid flipping burgers is doing any less for the national good than, say, a subsidised lunatic artist who pins a lump of dogshit to a barbed-wire crucifix and deems it art of national relevance.
Yeah, well, it’s a good thing your blog doesn’t get commonwealth finding then, isn’t it?
Yes, you’re right. I’d hate any Commonwealth finding at all. Why can’t they just keep their findings to themselves?
Diversity doesn’t mean extremes – one of the wonderful things about Perth is the rich diversity in culture and for that to be reflected in the food/catering industry is ideal and I think homogenizing diverse communities with multinational plastic food is about as far from ideal as is possible.
The endurance and initiative fast food employees must have to stick with it is just incredible – imagine that channelled into small business and communities instead of some mega giant faceless nameless tasteless schamozzle.
Diversity and respect for individuals does better our communities, small business can allow for that where a multinational couldn’t ever.
… a subsidised lunatic artist who pins a lump of dogshit to a barbed-wire crucifix and deems it art of national relevance.
Sounds interesting. Where can I see it?
[Removed at commenter's request. ---RC.]