Fast Food - Fast Strikes

McDonald’s, Wendy’s and KFC along with dozens of profitable Wall Street-listed fast food and retail chains, is being rocked by unprecedented workforce- and consumer-led protests over wages and conditions. On December 5, many workers at fast-food restaurants around the country took strike action  for higher pay and better working conditions. Their primary demand is an increase in their base hourly wages to $15 an hour. Earlier this month thousands of fast food workers in cities including New York, Chicago and Detroit took to the streets, many wearing red “Fight for 15” T-shirts - a reference to the popular call for a $15 (£9.70) hourly wage, almost double the current minimum. With more protests planned for the autumn, America’s most marginalized, vulnerable and exploited workforce is on the march.

“We’re frustrated and we’re angry,” says Alex Mack, 33, a worker at Wendy’s in Chicago. “I make $8.25 an hour and it’s impossible to live on. I’m a father, a husband. I’m always robbing Peter to pay Paul, shorting one bill to pay another.” But Mack is optimistic that the strike action will be successful. “If we stick together, it’s not impossible,” he says. http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/11/318247/fastfood-workers-protests-starvation-wages/

Here are things you should know.

1. If wages had kept pace with productivity gains, the minimum wage would be over $16 an hour.

Corporate profits have soared. Workers are producing more, but they’re not sharing in the rewards.  Productivity and the minimum wage generally increased at the same rate from 1947 to 1969, during this country’s postwar boom years. Using a conservative benchmark, economists Dean Baker and Will Kimball determined that the minimum wage would be $16.54 today if it had continued to keep pace with productivity. The strikers are asking for $15 an hour.

2. The average fast food worker makes $8.69 an hour.  Many jobs pay at or near the minimum wage, which is $7.25 per hour. And an estimated 87 percent of fast food workers receive no health benefits.

3. The CEO of McDonald’s Corporation makes $13.8 million per year. That’s a 237 percent pay increase over last year, when he was paid a “mere” $4.1 million. Presumably health benefits are also included.

4. McDonald’s cost the American taxpayer an estimated $1.2 billion in public assistance per year. In other words, taxpayer money is subsidizing this large corporation’s profits - at the expense of American workers. The 10 largest fast food companies cost taxpayers an estimated $3.9 billion in government health assistance and $1.04 billion in food assistance. With all the talk of deficit reduction, it’s surprising that no one has pointed out that a great way to lower expenditures would be by ending these back-door subsidies for highly profitable corporations. Fast food workers are more than twice as likely to be on public assistance.  25 percent of American workers receive some form of public assistance - which is a disturbing figure itself. For fast food workers that figure was 52 percent. And it’s not just part-time work that’s causing the problem. More than half of full-time fast food workers receive some form of public assistance.

5. McDonald’s made $1.5 billion in profits last quarter.  That’s up 5 percent from the previous year.

6. These 10 companies earned $7.4 billion in profits last year.  They also paid out $7.7 billion in dividends.

7. Most of the workers who would be affected by this wage change are adults. We also hear that it’s not necessary to raise the minimum wage, especially for fast food workers, because most of them are “kids” working a few hours each week for pocket money. But it’s not true. Most low-wage workers are adults. Nationally, adults make up 88 percent of the workers who would receive a raise if the minimum wage were increased to $10.10 per hour. In locales as distinct as New York State and Albuquerque, New Mexico, that figure rises to 92 percent.

8. Over 7 million children live in minimum-wage households.  And many of these workers are parents. Seven million children - nearly one American child in ten - feels the effects of low wages.

9. This strike is targeting large employers.  66 percent of low-wage workers are employed by organizations with 100 employees or more. Thursday’s strikers aren’t targeting mom-and-pop operations. They’re striking against some of America’s largest corporations. How large? McDonald’s employs 707,850 people. Yum! Brands (better known as Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC) employs 379,449 people. Altogether these 10 companies employ 2,251,956 people. Forty years ago the largest employers in the US were unionized companies such as General Electric and US Steel, paying more than the median household income. Now, when minimum wage companies are the largest employers The workforce for these ten companies is greater than the populations of Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, states which hold 28 seats in the United States Senate.

McDonald's is so immersed in a patrician philosophy that it offers its 700,000 U.S. workers clueless advice instead of decent wages. Earlier this year, McDonald's provided workers with a budget to help them make ends meet on pittance pay. McDonald's told them to take a second job, work 80 hours a week! Even then, the budget didn't account for heating bills.  A raise would work much better for most workers. That's exactly what McDonald's gave its CEOs last year. It tripled the pay of its new and retiring CEOs. The new guy, Jim Skinner, now gets $27.7 million. At Thanksgiving, McDonald's offered its workers some more advice -- including breaking their food into small pieces so they'll feel full after eating less. Good advice for workers who can't afford a Happy Meal, let alone a turkey and trimmings. McDonald's McResource site tells workers not to whine about their low wages and empty stomachs. Don't worry, be happy, it warns: "Stress hormone levels rise by 15% after ten minutes of complaining." Many McDonald's workers are now ignoring that counsel.

 “The McDonald’s wage - like any minimum wage - is basically a starvation wage,” says John Mason, a professor of politics at William Paterson University in New Jersey. “It effectively places you at 30% below the official poverty budget. They only succeed in this strategy because they’re massively subsidised by the government through food stamps and Medicare.”

Generation X were locked into “McJobs”. Now those same jobs are filled with older, better-educated workers, many trying to support families. It’s those workers in “poverty-wage” employment who are pressing for reform, says Jonathan Westin, director of Fast Food Forward. “Many have been pushed out of well-paying jobs and found themselves in the fast food industry struggling to get by,” he says. “It’s not teenagers working for pocket money, it’s mothers and fathers.” He adds “Folks at the bottom are not seeing the benefit of huge corporate profits and the rising stock marke. They see the price of everything going up except their wages.”

A typical McDonald’s franchise earns around six cents on the dollar; the combined profit of major US retailers, restaurant chains and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 index is smaller than the profits of Apple alone. A recent study suggests the cost to consumers if the wage demands were met would be only 20 cents per item. For companies, the pressure to ensure corporate profit hasoutweighed the demands of labor, says Professor Arne Kalleberg, author of Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.