The Low Paid Fight Back

Two hundred workers from dozens of fast food outlets in New York City—including McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Domino's, and Taco Bell—walked off their jobs on the 29th of November to demand $15 an hour in pay and the right to form their own independent union, according to the organizers of Fast Food Forward.Although still rather modest in numbers of strikers it was nevertheless still the largest strike ever in the United States against the $200-billion-a-year fast food industry and represents the latest in a wave of collective actions by low-wage workers to change conditions in their industries and, in many cases, to form unions. Before Thanksgiving, fast food and retail workers in the posh North Michigan Avenue shopping district in Chicago launched a new union with protest marches. This year, warehouse workers, mainly for Walmart, have expanded organizing and conducted successful strikes. On Black Friday, after Thanksgiving, roughly 500 Walmart workers nationwide refused to report for work and protested alongside tens of thousands of supporters. Retail workers in New York have launched a fight for "sustainable scheduling," and car washers from Los Angeles to New York have joined or launched unions. Workers in these and other low-wage occupations have long endured poor and unpredictable wages, few or no benefits, erratic scheduling, arbitrary treatment by supervisors and a lack of voice at work.

Over the decades there have been occasional efforts to unionize a fast-food restaurant here or there.  Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, said there had been so few efforts to unionize fast-food workers because it was such a daunting challenge. “These jobs have extremely high turnover, so by the time you get around to organizing folks, they’re not on the job anymore,” she said. Tim McIntyre, a Domino’s Pizza spokesman, said the few efforts to unionize its stores and drivers had fallen flat. “It’s a fairly high-turnover position, so there’s never been a successful union effort,” he said. “People who are doing this part time, seasonally or as they work their way through college don’t find much interest in membership.”

“The fast-food industry employs tens of thousands of workers in New York and pays them poverty wages,” Mr. Westin said, organizing director at New York Communities for Change, a community group “A lot of them can’t afford to get by. A lot have to rely on public assistance, and taxpayers are often footing the bill because these companies are not paying a living wage.” The group has played a major role in the recent uptick in unionizing low-wage workers in New York, many of whom are immigrants. In the past three months, it has helped win unionization votes at four car-washes and six supermarkets in New York.

A new campaign has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city. Mr. Westin said the campaign was using techniques that differed from those in most unionization drives, and was still developing overall strategy. He declined to say whether it would pursue unionization through elections or by getting workers to sign a majority of cards backing a union. Richard W. Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell, said the organizations backing the fast-food campaign seemed intent on finding pressure points to push the restaurants to improve wages and benefits. The recession has given added urgency to workers' discontent. And increasingly, middle-income workers find themselves driven into precarious jobs, the fastest-growing segment of the job market. 60 percent of the jobs lost in the recession fell in the middle-wage range, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, but only 22 percent of jobs generated in the recovery pay in that range. On the other hand, low-wage jobs made up only 21 percent of jobs lost but account for 58 percent of the new jobs. Some of the new low-wage workers lost their former jobs in the recession or if still in work with the fall in wages require a second job to pay bills. Nationwide, NELP reported, 43 percent of job growth during the past two years came in just three low-wage industries: food, retail and temp staff agencies.

According to the State Labor Department, median pay for fast-food workers in the city is around $9 an hour — or about $18,500 a year for a full-time worker. In Chicago, where the proportion of the workforce holding low-wage jobs has increased by nearly a third over the past decade. Even with a union, it might be hard to obtain wages of $15 an hour, and many employers may employ fewer workers if they had to pay more.