It all began last November when McDonald's workers in New York walked off the job on Black Friday, the immensely popular discount shopping day after Thanksgiving.
In August of this year, New Yorkers were joined by fast food employees from other chains including Taco Bell in a
mass walkout across 50 cities.
With the strikes and protests now
spreading to over 100 cities, what began with dissatisfied workers in a single store has turned into a fully-fledged movement called
Fight for 15, as in for a minimum wage of $15 per hour.
The protesting workers are aiming high. Critics argue that raising wages would lead to job losses, and president Barack Obama himself is hoping for an increase to just $9 per hour. But in an environment of rising food and housing costs, this still won't lift fast food workers out of poverty.
America's unskilled fast-food workers are as marginalised as it is possible to be. Undervalued by their employers and mocked by their compatriots, who seem to conflate dislike of poverty with hatred of poor people, their dreams of a living wage is hindered by a widespread belief that being low-skilled means you should just "quit complaining" and
be happy to have a job, any job.
Of course, this antipathy is driven in no small part by a fear that a wage hike will drive prices up as corporations pass the costs on to consumers. However, these fears are unfounded.
In Australia, where the minimum wage is $14.50 per hour and McDonald's pays $15 per hour, consumers pay $4.62 for a Big Mac,
just five cents more than Americans who buy $4.56 burgers from workers making an average of just $7.75.
Moreover, by McDonald's own admission, paying its workers $15 per hour would increase the cost of items on its famed Dollar Menu to
just $1.25.
It's hard to get this point - that a living wage for all Americans is surely worth a few extra cents for takeaway food - across in the US where the insistence that everyone has equality of opportunity has tainted society to the extent that poor people are blamed entirely for their predicament. Failure to overcome being born into poverty, with its associated educational and criminal disadvantages, is widely regarded as the fault of those affected by it,
not the society that allows it to happen.
After all, the thinking goes, if America is the land of opportunity and anyone can make it big, then being stuck in poverty must surely be a failure of you own character; if you are poor in the land of the free, it must be because you're just not working hard enough.
The truth is, low-wage workers do work hard, often toiling at two or three jobs, for up to 70 hours a week, subsisting on just a few hours' sleep a night. And they still struggle just to make ends meet, let alone escape the tedium and exhaustion of endless poverty.
And now, the fast food workers revolution has come full circle back to New York City where ultra-hip artisan bakery, Amy's Bread, has been charged with abusing and under-paying minimum-wage workers.
Buoyed by the rising protest movement across the country, employees have
delivered a petition to the owners of Amy's Bread. Their demands? A living wage, health insurance, and - perhaps most audacious of all - respect.
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