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Published on Thursday, December 5, 2013 by Campaign for America's Future Blog
12 Fast Facts About Thursdays Fast-Food Strike
by Richard Eskow
This Thursday, December 5, workers at fast-food restaurants around the country will be striking for higher pay and better working conditions. Their primary demand is an increase in their base hourly wages to $15 an hour. Here are 12 things you should know about Thursdays action.
(Credit: Low Pay Is Not Ok)This Thursday, December 5, workers at fast-food restaurants around the country will be striking for higher pay and better working conditions. Their primary demand is an increase in their base hourly wages to $15 an hour.
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 theyre not sharing in the rewards.
Productivity and the minimum wage generally increased at the same rate from 1947 to 1969, during this countrys 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.
(Source: Baker and Kimball, Center for Economic and Policy Research)
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.
(Source: UC Berkeley Labor Center)
3. The CEO of McDonalds Corporation makes $13.8 million per year.
Thats a 237 percent pay increase over last year, when he was paid a mere $4.1 million. Presumably health benefits are also included.
(Source: USA Today)
4. McDonalds cost the American taxpayer an estimated $1.2 billion in public assistance per year.
In other words, taxpayer money is subsidizing this large corporations profits at the expense of American workers.
(Source: National Employment Law Project)
5. McDonalds made $1.5 billion in profits last quarter.
Thats up 5 percent from the previous year.
(Source: McDonalds Corporation)
6. The 10 largest fast food companies cost taxpayers an estimated $3.9 billion in government health assistance and $1.04 billion in food assistance.
Republicans are demanding cuts to government health and food programs. With all the talk of deficit reduction, its surprising that no one has pointed out that a great way to lower expenditures would be by ending these backdoor subsidies for highly profitable corporations.
(Source: UC Berkeley Labor Center)
7. These 10 companies earned $7.4 billion in profits last year.
They also paid out $7.7 billion in dividends. Meanwhile
(Source: National Employment Law Project)
8. 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 its not just part-time work thats causing the problem. More than half of full-time fast food workers receive some form of public assistance.
(Sources: University of California, Berkeley/University of Illinois study; UC Berkeley Labor Center)
9. Most of the workers who would be affected by this wage change are adults.
We also hear that its 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. Think of this as the malt shoppe argument.
But its 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.
(Sources: US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Fiscal Policy Institute, New Mexico Voices for Children/Fiscal Policy Project)
10. 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.
(Source: data from the National Womens Law Center)
11. This strike is targeting large employers.
66 percent of low-wage workers are employed by organizations with 100 employees or more. Thursdays strikers arent targeting mom-and-pop operations. Theyre striking against some of Americas largest corporations.
How large? McDonalds 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.
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. Shouldnt these fast-food workers have a voice of some kind too?
(Sources: National Employment Law Project, US Census Bureau)
12. Theres probably a rally near you.
Theres an easy-to-use website to help you find one. Theres also an online workers strike kit, for fast food workers who want to take action.
(Source: Low Pay Is Not OK)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
KansDem
(28,498 posts)Just enter your zip code!
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)that are stealing their country? That they have been paying these parasites to kill them and their families for generations?
http://billmoyers.com/2013/12/05/12-fast-facts-about-thursday%E2%80%99s-fast-food-strike/
Here's a link to the Find-a-Rally-Near-You page.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)going on today that our local Fox owned TV Channel actually covered. This channel has been known to either ignore or downplay with some RW Talking point any of our protests about Occupy, Peace Activism, Voting Rights Demonstrations and other efforts activists have made in past years. Since so many have relatives, friends or neighbors who work in Fast Food Industry and others that pay under what Minimum Wage should be...maybe it means that some sympathy is building for coverage of this. I can hope anyway.
DirkGently
(12,151 posts)I am boycotting fast-food restaurants because I don't want to be served by someone who can't make a living working full-time at a thankless job.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)Response to KoKo (Original post)
warrprayer This message was self-deleted by its author.
All the math seems to point to a hike in minimum wage being good for the economy overall. Basically, the places who pay the least actually serve the most customers of those making the least.
E.g. lots of people who work for Walmart are also in the brackets of folks likely to shop there.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)I thought it was good "Pocket Notes" to reveal to the Tea Party factions in our families?