At least for the last 20 years, definitely. What do you think happens when to the value of labor when you make capital essentially free for 20 years (low interest rates)? Hiring senior wall street execs to run the Fed and Treasury didn't help.

Once again, Slashdotters assume the world revolves around them. Guess what, you are now old and culturally irrelevant. You are no longer the target audience. Get used to it.

Three points:

1) This is basic labor vs capital economics. Our monetary policy for the past 15+ years has basically made capital free. When given the choice between building an expensive robot factory vs one that uses labor, and interest rates are 2-3%, you might as well build the robot one. So there is less demand for labor and the value of labor declines = less wage bargaining ability.

2) McDonalds corporate charges a franchise fee of 12% of revenue (not profits). Since Pappa Ronald controls the cost of inputs (fries, burgers, etc) and the prices you can charge, that basically leaves franchise owners with one option for making money: screw over their employees. Corporate McDonalds averaged $5 billion in profits over the past few years, by the way.

3) Pay your workers a decent wage and charge prices that reflect actual value. I really don't care if my cheeseburger costs $1.50 instead of 99 cents.

I was really disappointed with the first episode. While the interviews with the pioneers were interesting, the editing and voiceover was poor. Too much time was spent trying to tie in early videogames to sociological movements of the 60s and 70s, and somehow the show flew Space Invaders/Pac-Man straight to the video game bust of the early 80s -- skipping the hundreds of great games that came in between.