Less than a week after
more than 110 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested at Black Friday protests and strikes, fast food workers are escalating their fight for fair wages, fair treatment, and the right to organize. One-day strikes are planned for Thursday at
fast food restaurants in 100 cities, Steven Greenhouse reports, including cities like Providence, Rhode Island, and Charleston, South Carolina, that have not been among the dozens in which fast food workers have staged walkouts to date.
“There’s been pretty huge growth in one year,” said Kendall Fells, one of the movement’s main organizers. “People understand that a one-day strike is not going to get them there. They understand that this needs to continue to grow.”
The National Restaurant Association is, as usual, responding to the strikes by trying to convince potential customers that low-wage fast food workers are just kids trying to earn some extra cash, not adults and parents as they actually are. Basically, the fast food industry's position is that restaurants shouldn't have to pay enough for workers to live on—workers should instead
apply for government assistance to make ends meet. And that's why workers need to fight. Because the same corporations that pay these poverty wages also lobby for lower corporate taxes (meaning less government revenue available for things like food stamps), trying to increase inequality and make poverty worse from both directions.
Fast food workers need to fight, in other words, because beyond their individual terrible circumstances—the choices between rent and food or utility bills—this is about justice at the most basic level, and if we'll tolerate a society in which inequality keeps increasing.