Round Two: Fast Food Strike for $15 An Hour
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford
“The worst-paying job in America is fast food cook.”
Thousands of fast food workers say they’ll go on strike on Thursday, September 4, demanding a $15 an hour wage. The current national minimum wage is $7.25. Organizers say burger and chicken franchises in more than 100 cities will affected by Thursday’s action, which will include sit-downs and other non-violent civil disobedience tactics.
The fast food workers staged a one-day walkout back in May in 150 localities, with varying levels of success. A national conference brought 1,300 worker-activists to Chicago, in July, to gear up for a second round of walkouts. The organizing drive is paid for by the SEIU, the Service Employees International Union – the nation’s second largest and intensely loyal to President Obama.
The fast food workers must be doing something right. They got a kind-of, sort-of endorsement from Barack Obama on Labor Day, when the corporatist president mentioned the fast food workers movement at a speech in Milwaukee. Obama didn’t endorse $15 an hour – he’s called for a $10.10 minimum – but Obama said that if he worked in the food service industry and “wanted an honest day’s pay for an honest days work,” he’d join a union.
Obama ran for the White House the first time around promising he would endorse organized labor’s “card check” bill, which would have made it much easier for workers to join unions. But, once elected, Obama barely gave lip service to the legislation – which died of neglect – and packed his administration with corporate operatives for the next six years.
According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, nine out of ten of the worst paying job s are in the food services industry, which is disproportionately Black and brown. The worst-paying job in America is fast food cook, averaging $9.07 an hour.
In most states, women make up more than half the workers stuck at minimum wage. Studies show that federal taxpayers spend billions of dollars a year essentially subsidizing the profits of low wage industries through food stamps and other assistance to millions of workers who can’t maintain their families on poverty paychecks and uncertain working hours.
McD’s Can’t Hide Behind Franchisees
McDonald’s, the global granddaddy of low wage burger joints, goes into this second wave of walkouts in a very different legal situation than back in May. The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that McDonald’s can’t hide behind its franchise agreements to claim that the local franchise holders are responsible for wages at its 14,000 restaurants in the United States. The decision makes McDonald’s a much better target for nationwide unionization, presumably by the SEIU.
The fast food industry claims that $15 an hour is unreasonable, but a report by the National Employment Law Project shows that “most large, low-wage employers have already recovered” from the Great Recession.” Their employees, of course, have not.
The SEIU is asking workers in its affiliated home health care unions to protest alongside the fast food workers in six cities, including Seattle, where a grassroots movement led by the Socialist Alternative party won a gradual $15 an hour minimum wage, this year.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com , and sign up for email notifications of new issues, each Wednesday.
The arrest and assault of Chris Smalls is about more than the repression of any effort to subvert the genocidal blockade on Gaza; it exposes Israel’s attempt to sever Black and Palestinian solidarity…
A study in The Lancet estimates that unilateral sanctions have caused as much death as wars, with an estimated half a million deaths per year.
Interview with Arnold August, writer, political commentator, and analyst of the North American continent, on the political situation in Canada and its relationship to the US.
The New York Declaration doesn't merely betray Palestine. It weaponizes the language of statehood to formalize the suppression of a people's right to exist without colonial rule.
Gambians from all walks of life – led by the youth-driven GALA movement mobilized across the country on July 23 in an anti-corruption protest as momentum for change grows.
