Fast food workers are prepared to launch their latest one-day strike this Thursday in more than 150 cities across the country. The workers' fight for $15 an hour pay and the right to join a union went public just over two years ago, on November 29, 2012, in New York City, and has grown to involve thousands of workers and spur the momentum for state and local minimum wage increases. The campaign for $15 and a union has also spread
beyond the fast food industry:
Latonya Allen, a home health care worker from Atlanta, Georgia, and Abera Siyoum, a worker at Minnesota’s Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, also spoke on the call. Home health care workers and airport service workers are also engaged in campaigns for higher wages and improved working conditions. And workers from both industries will be rallying in support of the fast food workers on Dec. 4.
“In Minneapolis and across America, we are fighting for $15 because we want to change our lives for the better,” said Siyoum. “This is why I’m proud to stand together with fast food workers and home care workers. This is why I’m in this movement.”
The fast food strikes and other actions by low-wage workers have been a major source of momentum behind increasing the minimum wage. No one was talking about $15 an hour until fast food workers started fighting for it in late 2012. The Democratic proposal of a $10.10 federal minimum was generally portrayed in the media as a reach, the grounds for a compromise to something lower. $15 sounded impossible, yet now two major American cities—Seattle and San Francisco—are on their way there, while Chicago is about to pass a $13 an hour minimum wage, Oakland has approved a $12.25 wage, Washington, DC, and neighboring counties in Maryland are on their way to $11.50, and Massachusetts is going to $11. Doubtless some or all of these cities and states would have done something about the minimum wage without this level of worker organizing, but there's no way we'd be seeing so many places going above $10.10.