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It’s Not The Chef, It’s The Owner

To The Reader’s Forum:

The term “working poor” is like calling a chef who is busy cooking in a kitchen full of food a “hungry chef.”  The resource ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) tells us that there are “tens of thousands of Chautauqua County households who have a very modest income, have little or not savings, and are one emergency aways from falling into financial crisis” (Post-Journal, Sunday, November 27). The United Way is glad to have this information so it can better understand the working poor and it has four programs to help ALICE families: 1.  ensuring families are self-sufficient; 2. everyone is ready to work; 3. young people succeed in school; 4. those in need can find help.

Let us use those programs to help the hungry chef.  The chef is working hard, works overtime, budgets well, and yet is still not self-sufficienct.  So working hard is not enough to be self-sufficient.  How will we make the chef self-sufficient?  Have him get a job?  He already has one.  In fact, his work generates $62,000 of profit, yet he gets none of it (which is the profit each employee of McDonald’s generates per year. Take the GDP of Chautauqua County, divide it by the number of workers, and you get $40,000 per worker.  So if you had a two income family, they would have a household income of $80,000.  How’s that for a program for the working poor?).  The chef is always early to work, healthy, determined, efficient, does extra work around the kitchen, so he is ready to work.  His high school kids are just like him in their readiness to work.  The kids are succeeding in school.  So the first three programs prepare the chef’s kids to be just like the chef–an ALICE family.

Those four programs are like looking at that chef’s kitchen that is full of food and saying to all who work in that kitchen that they have to try harder so that they can get a job in another kitchen full food that they are not allowed to eat from or take home.  Sure, after clean up and all the food is put in the walk-in fridge, the slop left in the sink drain or the crumbs on the floor are gathered together and are out in a basket with a large label “Those in need can find help here.”

The chef’s problem is not him, but the owner of the restaurant who keeps all the profit for herself, following the rule that owners get everything and the workers little.  A better program would be to make a rule that says all employees of a business have all authority and decision making power on what to do with the restaurant’s profits.  Let them decide who gets the profits–them, them and community programs, or whatever they feel is best.  Another program would be to require that all restaurants who increase their productivity must give all the gains of that productivity to the workers.  If that had been done for the last thirty, forty years the minimum wage would be almost $20/hr!  That is a problem that the United Way should fix.  All that the four programs do is equip people to be chefs in a kitchen full of food that they are not allowed to eat.

And if the chefs got the profit they generated in their job, they could spend more to take care of their families, more jobs would be created, and the sales tax revenue for Jamestown and the county would increase.  Simply helping the “hungry chefs” will not do that.  The problem is the owners.  Devise programs for the owners so they give the profits the workers generate to the “working poor.”

Timothy Hoyer

Jamestown

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