You're Paying A Ton To Subsidize Fast Food's Poverty Wages - HuffPo [View all]

[WillyT]

You're Paying A Ton To Subsidize Fast Food's Poverty Wages
The Huffington Post
Posted: 10/18/2013 2:39 pm EDT

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Taxpayers spend about $7 billion per year to help pay workers who are employed by an industry that rakes in $200 billion annually.

That's because the fast food industry's notoriously low wages force more than half of fast food workers to rely on some form of government assistance like food stamps or Medicaid to get by, a study from the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently found.

An analysis of the Berkeley/UI data from the left-leaning National Employment Law Project breaks down how much low-wages at the 10 biggest fast food chains are costing taxpayers.


Infographic by Alissa Scheller for the Huffington Post

These findings reflect the bleak reality of the low-wage recovery. Nearly 70 percent of the new jobs created since the end of the recession have been in low-wage sectors like fast food and retail and they’ve replaced largely middle-income jobs...

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More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/18/fast-food-industry-taxpayers_n_4123733.html?utm_hp_ref=business