#829strike: Fast food workers go on strike and ask for higher wages

Last year, on “Black Friday” fast food workers in New York went on strike and demanded higher wages in the Fast Food Forward campaign.

This energy and new infusion of energy in the diminishing labor movement was a sight for sore eyes and certainly illustrated that as much as the Koch Brothers and Republicans try, they cannot kill the labor movement and the energy of workers demanding fair pay and treatment.  We’ve covered additional strikes across the country over the past 9 months, but today is the big day.

Today is the largest strike in history as worker in nearly 50 cities are striking, demanding minimum wage be raised to $15 and the right to form unions.

Via Think Progress:

Thursday […] brings the fast food strikes to major cities in the south for the first time. Unions are less powerful in the south, and legal protections for workers tend to be weaker in southern states.

Low-wage workers in the retail and fast food industries have been walking off the job since last year to demand a minimum wage of $15 and the right to organize into unions. The fast food industry’s profits have soared, but those gains haven’t trickled down to workers. Fast food jobs, like the other low-wage service sector jobs that have been the primary source of post-recession job growth, do not currently allow workers to support themselves financially. McDonald’s recommends that its employees find a second job and go without heat or air conditioning in order to survive on the chain’s typical wages.

As the strikes have spread, the drumbeat to raise the minimum wage has grown louder. One congressional proposal would raise the federal minimum wage to $10 an hour, which would barely catch up to the buying power the minimum wage had in 1968.

Here’s hoping the corporate overlords will realize that without the labor of the workers there is no product, food, or profit.  Without the workers, McDonalds or Taco Bell cannot operate a successful enterprise.  These corporations should give back to the workers that are making these companies so profitable.