Fast food workers strike in New York in May
(Credit: Salon)
New strikes in the fast
food and retail industries are hitting Kansas City and Flint, MI on Monday,
joining their counterparts in a half-dozen other cities in walking off the job over
unlivable wages. The industry that has seen the majority of U.S. job growth
since the recession is under increasing pressure to raise pay and allow its
workers to organize.
Workers in New York City,
where the ongoing wave of fast food worker activism originated last fall, are
walking out of Wendy’s and McDonald’s restaurants early Monday and holding a
rally in Manhattan’s Union Square at 3:00. Kansas City and St. Louis will see
both fast food and retail walkouts on Monday as well, and over the coming days
they will be joined by workers in Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Flint. Activists in Seattle, which saw its own fast food strikes in late
May, also expect to participate in the
week of action. Counting Washington, D.C., where low-wage employees of federal
food and retail contractors have held three separate strikes this
spring and summer, the coast-to-coast organizing push now includes nine cities.
Workers’ call for a $15
hourly wage goes further than what some members of congress have proposed recently and far beyond President Obama’s endorsement of raising
the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour. Supporters point to businesses like
Costco, which pays an hourly rate over $20 and provides benefits for most of
its employees, as an example of howbig U.S. businesses could invest in workers without damaging
their competitiveness. The company recently reported $459 million in profits from a
single quarter, up 19 percent.
The millions of
private-sector jobs that have been added since the recession have mostly been low-paying service work that is insufficient to provide even a basic level of economic
security. Wages in the fast food industry are far below the level required to
support a family. McDonald’s runs a website intended to help employees budget,
and the site’s recommendations include getting a second job to get by. While both fast food and retail employers who pay
poverty wages defend their pay scales by saying they give junior employees
access to economic mobility through advancement opportunities, the reality is those jobs are almost always a dead end.
Last week marked four years since the last increase to the federal minimum wage, and research suggests increasing the
minimum wage would producebillions of dollars’ worth of net gains in economic activity.
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