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.
Yesterday’s nationwide fast-food workers strike may not have been the overwhelming success organizers may have been hoping for…but it wasn’t the impotent, abject failure fast-food industry moguls and apologists had expected. It takes a lot of courage for someone making $8.50/hr. to walk off their job, especially when they’re barely surviving financially and know their activism could cost them their job. While it’s too early to know what, if any, sort of long-term impact the strike will have on workers’ wages, at least they were able to raise awareness. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that Americans eat at fast-food restaurants knowing full well (and caring not at all) that the workers serving them are severely, grossly underpaid. When your employer suggests with no sense of irony that you should get a second job if you want to be able to pay your bills, what you have is full-blown, industry-wide exploitation. But, as long as I get my 3/4-lb. Megaburger and super-sized order of fries with a 64-oz. triple chocolate shake, who really cares, right?
I find it interesting that industry spokesmen/apologists are making the case that if workers are paid $15/hr., Americans will be paying more for their artery-clogging monster bacon cheeseburgers. Even more interesting is that none of them seem to look at what should seem an obvious reason for higher prices: the ridiculously outsized salaries CEOs and other executives are making. Executives pulling down six, seven, or even eight figures isn’t a problem…but paying their front-line workers a living wage is? Why is no one calling out this hypocrisy for what it is? If we’re going to have an honest conversation about worker exploitation…well, wait; the whole point is that the fast-food industry really doesn’t want an honest conversation. All they’re really interested in is maintaining the compensation inequity that currently exists by balancing their books on the backs of their workers, whom they tend to regard as disposable.
Even with all the coverage afforded the strike, I’ve seen nothing that even comes close to questioning the appropriateness of the salaries and bonuses paid to fast-food industry executives as they continue to insist on the need to keep their employees in penury. Isn’t it about time we admitted that it’s OK to pay a few cents more for our high-calorie, low-nutrition fast junk food if it means that those serving us can have a better quality of life? And isn’t it about time that we recognize that it’s time that ALL Americans deserve a basic level of quality of life? What, really, is so wrong with having a $15/hr. minimum wage? No one should have to hold two jobs in order to survive financially.
If the biggest problem in your life is that you have to pay more for your mass-produced, over-processed hamburger…well, isn’t it time we made sure that the people serving you can pay their bills and take care of their families?
