http://youtu.be/F0lA_8mnv2k
I’m a day late on this story, but I’m really, really thrilled to see this fast food worker movement growing by leaps and bounds — and you should be, too. These jobs that don’t pay a living wage have a huge ripple effect:
This morning marks the start of what will likely be the largest fast food worker mobilization in U.S. history, with a New York City walkout today kicking off strikes in seven cities over four days. These work stoppages by non-union workers are the latest escalation in an embattled labor movement’s unprecedented challenge to the overwhelmingly non-union industry, whose ranks are growing and whose conditions are spreading elsewhere in the U.S. economy.
“I know you’re tired of suffering,” KFC employee Naquasia LeGrand told fellow workers gathered with clergy and politicians at a rally last Wednesday announcing that New York City worker-activists had voted to strike this week. “I don’t want to see the next generation suffering and suffering. I don’t want my kids suffering. I want to make sure they have a better future than I do.” Looking out on a crowd of about 150 at the entrance to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, LeGrand added, “So if I want that to happen, I need you guys to stand with me just as long as I’m standing with you.”
As Salon first reported, the fast food effort went public last November, with a strike by about 200 employees of various chains in New York City. Over the past four months, that walkout has been followed by similar work stoppages in five other cities, and a second New York City strike roughly twice as large. Each of those strikes has been backed by the Service Employees International Union and local allies, and each has shared the same demands: a raise to $15 per hour, and the chance to form a union without intimidation by management. This week’s strikes will include five of those six cities – New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, and Milwaukee– and two new ones: Kansas City and Flint, Mich. (A spokesperson for the campaign in Seattle, where workers struck in May, told Salon to expect “a series of escalating direct actions” there this week.)“I might be doing the work of three people” due to under-staffing, McDonald’s employee Kareem Starks told me after Wednesday’s rally, “but still getting paid one wage.” Starks, a 30-year-old former Parks Department employee, said it’s “been hard trying to live off the minimum wage, $7.25, and support my two kids plus pay rent.” As we spoke, a fellow fast food worker walked over to introduce himself, congratulate Starks on the speech he’d just delivered, and show him a scar on his arm. “I got burned too myself,” he told Starks. “But my manager doesn’t care.”
This will fail for lack of strategic coherence. Pick a second tier target (say KFC) and using net based personal media call for a boycott of one brand until they up wages. If you want to attack the fast food industry as a whole, ask everyone to skip the sides. Order water with that Big Mac. All of the margin in the “value meals” is in the fries and Coke. “No Coke. No Fries.” No profit.
Organizing the service industry makes sense. Especially the fast food sector. We all want to know where the new unions are going to come from that replace the UAW and the Teamsters. The service indusry seems the most logical.
On one of the local early evening/late afternoon news broadcasts, over the weekend, iirc, a woman was discussing the plight of the minimum wage workers. And, clearly, what they earn is not enough to live on. Period.
She discussed the McDonald’s budgeting training handout, the one that didn’t mention food as a regular expense, said the Mickey D’s hourly rate total wagres should be be augmented with a second job., and that while a car payment was included, gas to run the car was not.
This woman said it was often difficult to work two full time jobs (and raise a family, commute, etc.) or enough different part time jobs to equal a part time job (with no mention of all the extra commuting expenses), so what people should do is…ta dah!…FIND ANOTHER SOURCE OF INCOME!! That meant self-employment of some sort, such as baby sitting, pet care…or something the person is able to do in his or her spare time and get paid for doing it. Yeah, riiiiiight. That’s the ticket! Hey, how about selling drugs? Breaking Bad shows how well it can work out, eh?
Because paying people a living wage just wouldn’t work in the current profit over anything else atmosphere. what with with having to pay super high CEO and other upper exec pay/compensation packages, ya know.
I wanted to throw something at the TV, but it’s the only one that gets the corrupted and/or too weak Cablevision HD signal.
(Cablevision told the FCC that if they took analog service away and required people to pay for HD set top boxes –each set must have one at about $7.50/month–, they could then offer more services since HD took less bandwidth than analog. It would all be good.
Except that the set top HD boxes send signals to the customer’s HD boxes and also need to send signals back to the main Cablevision computers, which takes up more bandwidth and, for me, means I can get only one set to receive a somewhat usable signal. When I said I was told I needed a booster, customer service told me I probably would need to rewire my house, that the wiring that worked for analog wasn’t good enough for HD. At my expense, of course.
Cablevision had promised they would never take away our analog service, so we didn’t need to buy any of those HD antenna thingies — we analog users would always have excellent Cablevision cable service. Ha. Lying corporate liars.)