Employees of fast food restaurants in seven cities take to the streets in front of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and KFC to protest for a living wage, Monday, July 29, 2013.
Fast food jobs are fast becoming a hot commodity as the job market narrows their qualifications with standards that include more experience, education, and a high credit score. But, the fast food industry still doesn’t provide an opportunity for anyone who wants to feed their family.
Monday, protesters took to the streets in front of major fast food chains including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, KFC, and Taco Bell, in an effort to bring attention to the wages that do not meet the demand of the new fast food employee. Workers in Detroit, Flint, St. Louis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, New York City, are all seeking to have their wages raised and prevent abusive labor practices that the restaurants have taken advantage of for years.
Many employees are upset with the extreme difference in wages paid to the CEO’s vs. the common employee whose daily tasks pays them all. The workers are asking for $15 per hour and a right to organize without retaliation or penalty. According to CNN Money:
“Currently, the median pay for the nearly 50,000 fast food workers in New York City is $9 an hour, or $18,500 a year, according to the New York Labor Department. That’s about $4,500 lower than Census Bureau’s poverty income threshold level of $23,000 for a family of four. While minimum wage in New York is $7.25 an hour, food service workers may earn $4.65 an hour because their total compensation includes expected tips.”
The new employee of fast food restaurants are those that have lost their jobs and have experience and education that far exceed the qualifications for flipping burgers. No longer are these jobs inhabited by the teenager looking for weekend pocket change, but now they are those that have families to feed.
Read more here and listen to some of the complaints from protesters below. We all better be more concerned about what this means because poor pay leads to poor performance which leads to more situations like we reported last week when a Subway employee thought it would be funny to rub his penis on a footlong at a Subway in Columbus, Ohio, and his co-worker freeze his own urine in the store’s freezer. And we can’t leave out the guy who exposed the food sitting by the dumpster at a Golden Corral in Florida. Can you imagine what will happen as employees get more and more disgruntled?
-J.C. Brooks