Business & Tech

400 NYC Food Service Workers Demand Higher Wages, Stage 'Largest Fast-Food Strike in History'

Workers at more than 60 restaurants across the city went on strike today, demanding a wage increase and the right to form a union without retaliation

 

A group of around 400 New York City fast food workers held a one-day strike Thursday at more than 60 McDonald’s, Dominos, Taco Bells and other fast food restaurants, demanding higher wages and the right to form a union, reported The New York Times

The walkout was sponsored by Fast Food Forward, a labor-community coalition sponsored by such groups as UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and the Service Employees International Union. The event's organizers are calling it "the largest fast-food strike in U.S. history."

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The walkout began in downtown Brooklyn at 11:00 a.m., and then moved to Manhattan and finally culminated in Harlem. The goal of the strike is to increase employee salaries at fast-food establishments to $15, as many of the restaurant workers say they can barely survive off of the $7.25, $8 or $9 they make an hour.

The current minimum wage in New York State is $7.25. And although lawmakers agreed last month to raise the minimum wage to $9 by 2016, $9 an hour translates to around $18,000 a year for a full-time worker.

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Tabitha Verges, 29, works at Burger King in Harlem for $7.25 an hour and is one of the hundreds who went on strike today in a show of solidarity.

She said for the last four years since she first started working at the restaurant, she has been refused a raise. “They always give me the same excuse — that they’re not making enough money,” she said.

Today’s strike was scheduled to coincide with the day that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 45 years ago in Memphis, where he was supporting a strike by low-paid sanitation workers.


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