LOS ANGELES -- Even as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti proposes a gradual raise in the minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, union organizers will rally fast-food workers in cities across the country in walkout Thursday as an ongoing movement to earn $15 per hour “intensifies and continues to spread.”
Coming off a convention outside Chicago at which they vowed to do “whatever it takes” to win $15 and the right to form a union, fast-food workers in more than 150 cities are expected to walk off their jobs Thursday.
Workers from Oakland, Calif., to Opelika, Ala., said they will strike at the country’s major fast-food restaurants, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and KFC. Workers in Little Rock, Ark. Minneapolis, Minn; and Rochester, N.Y., are among those who will walk off their jobs for the first time.
Fast-food workers from four continents are expected to travel to the U.S. to support strikers in Chicago, New York, Raleigh, N.C., and Los Angeles, where Garcetti on Labor Day proposed increasing the current minimum wage of $9 an hour.
The proposal, which would make Los Angeles' wage law among the highest in the nation, needs City Council approval to become law.
"I'm proposing to responsibly and gradually raise the minimum wage in L.A. to $13.25 because it's deplorable and bad for our economy to have 1 million Angelenos stuck in poverty, even when working full time,'' Garcetti said, according to a report in USA Today.
San Diego's council voted to raise the minimum wage in that city to $11.50 per hour in 2017. San Francisco voters will decide in November on a $15-per-hour wage proposal.
Thursday’s strike, meanwhile, comes a little more than a month after the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel determined that, despite McDonald’s repeated claims, the company is a joint employer that exerts substantial power over its employees’ working conditions.
For nearly two years, McDonald’s and other fast-food workers have been joining together and going on strike, calling for $15 and the right to form a union without retaliation.
Watch for coverage of the Fight for $15 and how it relates to convenience-store retailers in the October issue of CSP magazine.
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