THIS EDITORIAL WAS PUBLISHED IN THE VENTURA COUNTY STAR 10-21-13
Fast Food’s Low Pay Serves Up a Hidden Price
Next time someone asks if you want fries with your fast-food order, perhaps you’d better think a little about what that burger really is costing you.
You’re probably paying taxes to subsidize the fast-food industry and other businesses that employ Americans who don’t earn a living wage.
A study out last week by the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois found that we pay about $7 billion a year in public assistance programs to supplement the wages of fast-food workers.
“The taxpayer costs we discovered were staggering,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education and co-author of the report. “People who work in fast-food jobs are paid so little that having to rely on public assistance is the rule, rather than the exception, even for those working 40 hours or more a we e k .” The study — funded by Fast Food Forward, a group that organized fast- food workers’ walkouts this summer — paints a stark picture of America’s growing numbers of working poor. An estimated 73 percent of Americans who receive public assistance are from working families. More than half (52 percent) of the families who have fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public assistance programs, compared to about a quarter of the workforce as a whole.
Median pay for fast-food jobs is $8.69 an hour. Benefits are rare for such jobs; 87 percent do not get health insurance from their employers.
Instead, low-wage workers and their families turn to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, where their care costs taxpayers $3.9 billion a year. They also receive $1 billion in food stamps and $1.9 billion in earned income tax credit.
“More than two-thirds of core front-line fast-food workers across the country are over the age of20, and 68 percent are the main wage earners in their families,” said Marc Doussard, the study’s other author. “And more than a quarter of Americans working in fast-food restaurants are parents, raising at least one child.”
Fast food, it seems, swells both our waistlines and America’s public-assistance rolls.
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