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Fast Food Rights and the Fight for 15

21st April 2015

Fast Food Rights and the Fight for 15

Last Wednesday April 15th Fast Food Rights actions took place in London, Glasgow, Sheffield, Manchester, Darlington, Leeds, Birmingham, Leicester, Cardiff and Southampton. LRC members took part. In Britain the campaigning work of the Bakers’ Union (BFAWU) is to the fore and their prime target for recruitment is the fast food industry.

The inspiration for the campaign is the ‘Fight for 15’ movement ($15 an hour – the Bakers want £10 in the UK) in the USA.  On the same day that we were campaigning in Britain there was an international day of action against the scandal of low pay. Strikes and other action took place in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and more than 200 other cities across the US. Action was also taking place in Brazil, New Zealand and 33 other countries all across the globe.

In the USA the movement has been led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The movement for a pay that people can live on has also swept up home-care assistants, Walmart workers, child-care aides, airport workers, adjunct professors and other low paid workers. This has become the biggest labour revolt for decades and the biggest low paid revolt in American history.  Students mobilised in support at 170 campuses and in many respects this took on a battle fought by entire communities.

In contrast to the previous day of action in May 2014, where 100 arrests were made outside McDonalds HQ in Chicago, the authorities allowed the protest to pass off peacefully. 60,000 are said to have mobilised. Why not more? A union organiser explains: “Workers are afraid to stand up. The number one problem is fear. I would say less than 4% of the workers we contact stay on board.” Fear is still a big problem for low paid workers with precarious employment rights. This movement is a serious challenge to the rule of profit-gouging bosses, and they will resist with all their might.

The federal minimum wage is still pathetically low at $7.25 per hour. Even President Obama wants to raise it to $10.10, but he is encountering stiff resistance from the Republican millionaires and billionaires in Congress. All the same many cities and 11 states have increased the local minimum wage. In Seattle and the Bay area the minimum wage has been raised to $15 because of public support.

The movement began in New York in November 2012 in an attempt to organise McDonald workers. On April Fools’ Day 2015 McDonalds that they were raising their basic wage to $9.90 per hour. But this only applies to the 1,500 employees who work at McDonalds run restaurants, not to the 12,500 workers at franchise outlets. This produced a huge backlash (“Don’t be McFooled!”) and many workers from the franchises walked out in disgust to join the movement.

Here’s the context. The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington issues a report called ‘Off the Deep End: the Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low Wage Workers’:

It revealed that in 2014 Wall Street bonuses were nearly double the combined earnings in a year of more than a million full time workers on the minimum wage.

So 167,800 bank employees trousered $28.5bn while a million low paid workers were trying to make end meet on $7.25 an hour. The bankers’ bonus was 27% higher than in 2009, the last time that Congress raised the minimum wage.

The struggle goes on.