News Flash.....Fast food restaurants are not jobs meant to raise a family on. They are jobs for high school/college students. If you want to stay in the industry and make money you need to move up into store management. A company will never pay more than it has to to attract employees. For eons people have moved from small towns to the larger cities for opportunities to better their life. Because your mom chose not to seek out other opportunities does not mean some company has to overpay for her services.
FedEx is testing the wage scale right now to see how low they can pay and still provide a quality service. Managers have told me its not working and there has to be better wage progression to retain quality employees. Most of the kids that are being hired on as handlers now days have no work ethic. They are not looking for every hour available like many of us were. They want to work the fewest hours they can and then get off work and get high. The stupidity of these new employees is incredible.
I don't expect fast food restaurants to do any such thing. As I said in our town there was little economic opportunity, most kids grow up and leave. Plenty of adults work in fast food there. But before you judge her my mother worked two and three jobs for more than 30 years, often 75+ hrs a week. She did what she had to. But my point originally was that stagnant wages are usually in dead end jobs like fast food but that is now where FedEx seems headed because nothing is more important than making the rich richer. I've never expected UPS wages, but for the demands of the job one should be rewarded with better pay and benefits if they stick with it and work hard. And one shouldn't be lied to repeatedly either. Capitalism is obviously the best way to go but not this exploitation on a mass scale that's destroying the middle class.
P.S. FedEx figured out a long time ago they could get people at Ground to work for less with no benefits so they're trying to do the same, as much as they can, at Express to further enhance the profit. They know damn well what they're doing.