VANCOUVER – Thousands of minimum wage workers in the United States stepped away from fast food counters and restaurant floors on Thursday to demand higher pay.
They were expected to protest in 100 cities across the U.S., joined by labour organizers and other supporters, to call on the government to hike hourly wages to $15 an hour. By some estimates, there may have been as many as 150 demonstrations outside chain restaurants such as McDonald’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Burger King and many others.
The federal minimum wage across the country has been at $7.25 per hour since 2009, although it can vary depending on local legislation.
If you’re working full-time — 40 hours a week — at that wage, it means you’re grossing about $15,000 a year.
The poverty line in the United States is $11,490 a year for a single person and $23,550 for a family of four. It’s estimated about 15 per cent of the population — 46.5 million people — is living below that threshold.
It’s not a higher minimum wage that protesters are calling for, rather a “living wage,” said Dr. Anne Klaeyson of the New York Society for Ethical Culture (NYSEC).
She joined a crowd of protesters outside a McDonald’s restaurant on Broadway, in New York City, at 6:00 a.m. Thursday. She estimated there were close to 200 people on site.
“This messing around about a ‘minimum wage’ is getting us nowhere,” she said in a phone interview with Global News. “It’s time that we all thought about a living wage.”
According to Klaeyson, $15 is “below what it could be” considering how much work people are expected to do for bottom of the barrel pay.
“It’s now a race to the bottom to see how little you can pay,” she said.
The nation’s average income is $51,017 — quite an income gap for those 46.5 million people living in poverty.
So much so that President Barack Obama has thrown his support behind a Senate plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour over two years, saying the income divide poses “a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”
“I’m going to keep pushing until we get a higher minimum wage for hard-working Americans across the entire country. It will be good for our economy. It will be good for our families,” Obama said Wednesday evening during a speech in Washington D.C.’s Anacostia neighbourhood — one of the capital’s most poverty-stricken and crime-plagued areas.
But that target doesn’t come close to the $15 an hour protesters across the U.S. say they want to earn in order to make ends meet.
Having a federal minimum wage doesn’t necessarily mean servers and counter staff get paid equally across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories abroad.
In fact, if you’re a server earning tips you can be paid as low as $2.13 an hour in some places.
Klaeyson said the reason fast food restaurants have been put into focus is because they’re familiar brands. “A three-year-old knows McDonald’s,” she said.
But, the minimum/living wage issue concerns people working in retail, at car washes, in grocery stores and many other hourly-paid jobs.
Klaeyson explains there are a lot of critics who think people living below or around the poverty line are lazy, when actually they are the “working poor.”
Some of the critics of Thursday’s protest included the National Restaurant Association, a Washington, D.C.-based restaurant industry lobby group, which said the demonstrations were “a coordinated PR campaign engineered by national labor groups where the vast majority of participants are activists and paid demonstrators.”
“Dramatic increases in a starting wage such as those called for in these rallies will challenge that job growth history, increase prices for restaurant meals, especially in the value segments and lead to fewer jobs created,” spokesperson Scott DeFife said in a statement.
Klaeyson said restaurant goers would probably be willing to pay for a slight increase in the cost of fast food, but she said companies such as McDonald’s pay their executives enough that they could certainly afford to pay their lower-level workers a living wage.
And $15 an hour isn’t asking for much, she said. “There’s one study that showed if wages had kept pace with productivity gains, then the minimum wage would be over $16 an hour.”
A 2012 study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research said it could be as high as $21.72 an hour if minimum wage benchmarks kept up with current productivity.
The push for higher pay in the fast-food industry faces an uphill battle. The industry competes aggressively on value offerings and companies have warned that they would need to raise prices if wages were hiked. Most fast-food locations are also owned and operated by franchisees, which lets companies such as McDonald’s Corp., Burger King Worldwide Inc. and Yum Brands Inc. say that they don’t control worker pay, The Associated Press reported.
McDonald’s issued a statement in response to the protests saying the company respects “the right to voice an opinion, but added the rallies “were not strikes.”
“Outside groups are traveling to McDonald’s and other outlets to stage rallies. Our restaurants remain open today- and every day- thanks to our dedicated employees serving our customers,” the statement read.
“McDonald’s and our owner-operators are committed to providing our employees with opportunities to succeed. We offer employees advancement opportunities, competitive pay and benefits. And we invest in training and professional development that helps them learn practical and transferable business skills.”
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