Thursday, Jul 18, 2013 4:25 PM UTC
McDonald's got heat for telling its staff to
have two jobs. Its financial planning advice is even more offensive
By Paul Campos
Over
the past few days, McDonald’s has gotten itself quite a bit of bad
publicity, after it teamed with Visa to create a proposed
sample budget for the enormously profitable fast food corporation’s hundreds of thousands of low-paid workers.
Critics
have pointed out that the budget omitted such luxury items as food and
heat, that it made absurdly low estimates for medical insurance — and
that, most strikingly of all, it appeared to suggest that its workers
should maintain
two full-time jobs.
(And indeed working two nearly-full time jobs would be necessary to
produce the income in the sample budget, given the wages McDonald’s pays
most of its employees).
These are all valid points, but an even more basic criticism of McDonald’s helpful advice to its workforce needs to be made.
The
unstated assumption behind the McDonald’s budget is that the working
poor must be educated about financial planning. And that assumption is
in turn a belief that is deeply embedded among America’s cultural elites
– including among many people who consider themselves political
progressives.
That belief is: The working poor are poor because
they are at bottom spendthrifts, who don’t know the value of a dollar.
The working poor may have jobs, they may even work hard for their money,
but they don’t know how to save for a rainy day. Instead, they squander
their wages on overpriced impulse purchases, including fancy
cellphones, cable TV, proletarian beer and unhealthy food that makes
them fat.
Of course people who call themselves liberals feel
constrained to disguise this sort of dime store Calvinism in fancy
sociological jargon about the structural effects of cultures of poverty
and the like. Yet every time you read a piece in a liberal publication
about how we
shouldn’t criticize a big corporation for trying to give its minimum wage workers some financial pointers, you can be pretty confident that the Protestant ethic and
the spirit of capitalism is lurking just beneath the surface of the progressive writer’s text.
In
fact nothing could be more preposterous than rich people giving poor
people advice on how to stretch a dollar. The absurdity of this is
captured perfectly by John Scalzi’s aphorism that “being poor is knowing
exactly how much everything costs.”
I have seen secondhand (like
most members of the pundit class, I am not personally poor) a woman feed
herself and her three children on a $30 per week grocery budget, for
months on end. I’ve been amazed by her combination of discipline,
creativity and self-sacrifice. (A commenter to Scalzi’s post writes:
“Growing up poor means realizing twenty years later that Mommy was lying
when she said, ‘it’s OK sweetie, I’ve already eaten.’”)
And
although this may not be a particularly intellectually nuanced way of
making the point, I am of the opinion that any person, corporate or
otherwise, who want to “help” this woman by offering her a sample
monthly budget is in dire need of a swift kick in the groin.
The
great legal historian A.W.B. Simpson once said to me that “the problem
of the poor is not that they’re oppressed, but rather that they have no
money.” Precisely. The working poor generally work far harder than
their well-intentioned upper-class advisers, but they have no money.
In
other words, the poor don’t need financial advice; they need higher
wages. Yet apparently The Market – our all-seeing, beneficent Market,
which declares that it is right and just that some men should have
billions, while others sleep under bridges – has decided that higher
wages for the working poor are an offense against all that we hold
sacred.
Thus: “Let them make budgets.”
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