Mcdonald's Insult To Its Workers

Paul Campos talks about McDonald's sample budget for its low-paid workers:

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.

The comment about mom lying punched me in the gut.  I've never been there, but I can imagine the moms who go through that. The part about the working poor working far harder than their advisers I see every day.  There weren't too many office workers in our plant this week when it was oppressively hot, and when any of us were there, we didn't stick around too long.  Those guys on the floor were working 10 hour days in that crap.  I took off in the afternoon a couple of days to go try to kill myself, but I wouldn't have wanted to have been working 10 hours like those guys did.  And the thing is, so many folks in corporate America make so much money that they just can't understand what working class folks go through.  What's $50,000 to Lloyd Blankfein?  Not nearly enough to do God's Work, that's for sure.