If It's British I'm Probably a Fan

me @ 10

It was original fiction that she turned into a Stucky AU so she could post it to AO3 for reader feedback and then turned back into its original form once she started submitting to publishers.

Find them here: https://waronwant.org/McStrike-near-me 

There is no such thing as a job “for teens” (and even if there was, they deserve a fair wage for their labor, too.) Nobody should get paid so little that they need “side jobs.” 

So no. This is absolutely not a job just for teens. We have a giant compactor that crushes and crushes our trash. If you’re not 18 you’re not allowed to operate it. Anything sharp? Are you 18? Can’t touch it. Being a manger? Are you out of high school and at least 18? Forget it.

And honestly, I wouldn’t make any of the kids at my job deal with our customers when they’re going feral. Do you know how bat shit y’all are?? I had a woman start crying because we ran out of the Mc Rib and caused a scene in my drive-thru for 10 minutes. I’ve had old men cussing me out because Corp decided to bump a senior coffee from .99 to 1.09. Though if you sit inside, which they all do for well over two hours every morning… refills are free.

We have a lady here who we call “Princess Diamond” because she’s so fucking entitled she gave us a bad review on the McVoice because we served a homeless man and he sat to close to her… which was across the entire goddamn lobby. Would you really want a teen trying to deal with this woman??

I sure as shit don’t. I don’t allow her to deal with most of my Crew, actually. I’m as nice as freaking sugar in your tea to her face but if she gets rude I start slamming her order down on the tray. And as my Crew knows, the sweeter my voice gets the more trouble your in. She doesn’t stay long on days were I start getting aggressive with her food.

Side tracked- but no. We have so many things that need to be done all day long that we can’t legally let a minor do. A sister location was just fined over $5,000.00 because of labor violations pertaining to minors.

Just pay us so we can live. Please. A lot of these teens are trying to move out and get into apartments. But if an apartment costs 800.00 in rent and that’s usually one of the two checks a month an adult gets. Maybe. That’s a struggle even for myself, and it’s just my roommate, our dumb cat, and me. No children. He has a worse paying job.

The minimum wage, when it was set in 1938 as the United States was coming out of the Depression, was intended to be the minimum you needed to be able to pay your bills and raise a family on a single income. Not this bullshit we have today. It’s as low as it is because it hasn’t kept up with inflation.

Like, not only is working in fast food one of the hardest fucking jobs because it’s hot, it’s dangerous, and it’s full of the worst customers, but it’s also disrespected constantly, and people don’t think you deserve to be able to pay your bills. 

Fuck that. 

Pay workers enough to live on with a single full time job. 

It turns out that working 40 hours a week is just too much. Full stop, no ifs ands or buts. The tiredness and loss of focus it induces is enough that you're about 25% less productive per hour when you're on a 40-hour work week, and so the extra 10 hours a week cancels out. This effect is a little bit more pronounced for white collar work and a little bit less pronounced for blue collar work, but there's functionally not enough of a difference to care. And people who are working more than that actually become less productive in total.

The thing is that you don't immediately gain the benefits of being fully rested and focused by working less on just one day, or even one week. It can even take months to settle into the pattern of higher productivity per working hour, and that's frankly miraculously quick given that full burnout can take years to recover from. And during that transition you will be less immediately productive. Particularly for people who pride themselves on being hard workers and how much overtime they put in, the notion that working less can get just as much done can feel absurd and even insulting. Because it seems so painfully obvious that you get less done when you do less, and any experiences of being invited to do so feel like they back that up.

But it's true. We are all simply working more than we need to, pointlessly, to no benefit at all. It is an appallingly pointless waste of human life.