Naturally and appropriately, news from The Left during the last several days has focused on the life, death, struggle, and victory of Nelson Mandela. Totally appropriate for us to focus on the passing of one of our greatest freedom fighters and one of the greatest humans of all time.
It is a shame that during our celebration and mourning, one of the greatest actions in recent progressive and trade union history took place, and didn’t receive the attention it deserved.
With the assistance of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), community and student organizations and individual union activists, fast food workers went on strike last Thursday in 130 cities.
Let me say that again. Last Thursday fast food workers struck their workplaces in 130 cities.
The women in this photo bravely walked out of Wendy’s during the strike.
It was an awesome feat of militance, courage, determination, commitment to struggle, coordination, guts, and skilled organizing.
And it is just what America and the American labor movement needed.
My old friend SEIU President Mary Kay Henry and her very talented organizing staff deserve our respect and our gratitude.
More importantly, the thousands of workers who struck deserve our respect, our appreciation and all the support and solidarity we can eagerly give them.
The workers didn’t strike for union recognition or a new contract. They did not strike for an institutional relationship with their would-be masters.
They struck for a raise in pay, an escape from poverty, a better life for their kids, a doubling of the minimum wage, and the dignity and respect every human being deserves.
“We can’t raise the minimum wage,” Republicans on Twitter, Facebook, and Fox News blather. Radical right-wing Republican Members of Congress complain about the same thing.
I’m really having trouble with the logic. We give tax breaks and regulatory breaks to the richest corporations in the world. We refuse to tax the richest people in the history of the world at the same rate the rest of us pay. We forgive the lowlife bastards who destroyed $50 trillion of the world’s wealth, and they respond by busting unions, destroying jobs, outsourcing work to the most exploitable people in the world including kids, and by refusing to invest the money we gave them in American jobs.
But we cannot raise the pay of the poorest workers in America?
Something is wrong with us? Time to fight.
Image source: www.detroit15.org
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