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Free Liberal: Coordinating towards higher values

Free Liberal

Coordinating towards higher values

Want Fries with That?

Paul Jacob writes about the honorable profession of burger flipping. One of my fraternity brothers flipped burgers on his way to management at a McDonalds. For him, this was part of a track to eventual ownership of a franchise. His fellow burger flippers were probably not so lucky. Of course, luck had nothing to do with it, since he already had a B.A. from our alma mater.

The question of burger flipping raises some interesting questions from an anarcho-syndicalist perspective. Dano came to the system with the credentials necessary for management. The vast majority of burger flippers lack this, as would be expected of students who are not yet there or retirees who might but who have no ambition to own a Micky Dee's.

The franchise system pretty much prevents most of the former from having the resources through their company to acquire the credential required (unless they have a corporate tuition assistance program that I haven't heard about). Key features of the franchise system are their avoidance of sales risk for the main company and more importantly their avoidance of employee organization and benefit rules. That feature is not so honorable and not so beneficial for society at large. If McDonald's was a larger firm, it would likely offer better benefits because it would have likely been unionized by now. Better company benefits always mean that less government benefits are necessary. Like Wal-Mart employees, many burger flippers qualify for government sponsored health care programs. In other words, your tax dollars subsidize indirectly the low price of the food prepared at McDonalds.

If McDonalds were a unionized, anarcho-syndicalist company, it would offer employee-ownership type retirement benefits to its employees (making reliance on Social Security unnecessary, especially if Social Security private accounts include this option) as well as an educational track for its younger burger flippers toward management. This would more than make up for the loss of small business opportunities for some of its staff, which amount to ownership for the few and autocracy for the many. Ownership for all is a better plan in my book, as this would make government regulation in this area much less necessary in both the product and employee safety areas. It would also allow the libertarian dream of abolishing the Department of Education to occur (not to mention vastly curtailing the Department of Labor).

-Michael Bindner



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