A Death Knell for the McJob?

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/15957/a_death_knell_for_the_mcjob/

Strikes in 100 cities signal a sea change in attitudes about low-wage work.
BY David Moberg

Dawn Moore was on “strike” Thursday. It was more a protest than a conventional attempt to stop all work at her job site, but it still packed a punch. She took a day off from her work at a McDonald’s in Chicago to join more than 150 protestors who marched from one fast-food or retail store to another in both the downtown “Loop” and several outlying neighborhoods. Chanting “we are the 99%” and carrying a giant Grinch puppet, they were there to demand that employers in those low-wage businesses pay employees $15 an hour and respect their right to organize a union freely.




“I think we all deserve a fair living wage,” says Moore, 41, a 7.5-year veteran McDonald’s worker. A divorced mother of two, she struggles to pay off $9,000 in student loans she incurred during less than a year at a “scam” college and has to move back and forth between apartments of a friend and a sister.

“Eight dollars and sixty-five cents is unacceptable,” she said, standing in the morning cold near a McDonald’s in an office tower. “Not only are we the backbones of these companies, we bring the corporations the money, but out of all the people at the corporation and franchises, we get paid the least. They’d rather give more money to the people who have a lot than to the little people who run their stores.”

Similar protests marked the rough one-year anniversary of a campaign that kicked off last fall in New York, then Chicago, before spreading across the country. In some 100 cities throughout the country, marchers from unions, community groups and other sympathetic organizations turned out to demonstrate on behalf of the workers—and in most locations, fast-food workers joined in, usually a minority of leaders from most workplaces, many workers did risk illegal retaliation by their bosses.

FULL story at link.