Fast food workers are planning the largest one-day action so far on May 15. Workers will strike in 150 cities around the United States, and protests will be held in thirty other countries, including England, India, and South Africa.
The campaigners demand $15 per hour in wages and the ability to form a union. McDonald’s – which is facing several class-action lawsuits for wage theft – will be targeted in particular. Just this March, a $500,000 settlement was reached with the owner of seven McDonald’s franchises in New York for failure to pay 1,600 mostly minimum wage workers certain wages and legally-required stipends.
Fast food workers across the US have been striking and protesting for higher wages and more labor protections for over a year now – changes that would particularly help women and people of color. Seventy-three percent of all front-line fast food workers are women, and 43 percent are black or Latino. Fifty-two percent of fast food workers have to rely on public assistance because their wages are too low to survive on. “Meanwhile, the CEO of McDonald’s raked in about $13.8 million in fiscal 2012, an estimated 737 times what the average fast-food worker earned,” Michelle Chen reports in the Fall 2013 issue of Ms.
Several city and state legislators, most recently in Seattle and Maryland, have taken it upon themselves to raise their communities’ minimum wages, and President Obama issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors from $7.25 to $10.10. Just last week, however, Senate Republicans blocked a vote on legislation that would have increased the federal minimum wage.
