Strikes in July in New York for higher pay for fast food workers. Credit: mtume_soul/ CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Aug 29 2013 (IPS)

Workers at fast-food restaurants in 60 cities across the United States went on a one-day strike Thursday, the largest action yet in a strengthening year-long push for higher wages and the opportunity to form unions without retaliation.

The strike affected around 1,000 stores, organisers said, and also included workers in some national retail chains. The push for higher wages coincides with a broader movement to raise the U. S. minimum wage of 7.25 dollars per hour, one of the lowest among developed economies.

For those who took part in Thursday’s strike, median wages were estimated at less than nine dollars an hour, which both workers and labour rights activists say is impossible to live on in almost any part of the country. They are demanding “living wages” of 15 dollars an hour, more than twice the current federal minimum wage.

“Raising wages for low-wage workers is an economic necessity for communities all across the country,” Pastor W.J. Rideout III, with the Inter-Faith Coalition of Pastors in Detroit, said Thursday. “The only way to get our economy going again is to put more money in the hands of consumers. These striking workers are the best stimulus our economy could have.”

Fast-food workers’ low wages stand in startling contrast to the sector’s reported profits of about 200 billion dollars a year."When a parent is forced to work two jobs and still cannot support his or her family, it is clear that there is something very wrong."
-- Mary Lassen

Last year, for instance, McDonald’s alone reported nearly 5.5 billion dollars in profit. The parent company of several other large-scale chains, including Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell, saw its profits grow by nearly 75 percent, to 458 million dollars.

“For too long, large corporations have been able to ignore the needs of their employees while continuing to rake in huge profits,” Mary Lassen, managing director of the Centre for Community Change, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS in a statement.

“When a parent is forced to work two jobs and still cannot support his or her family, it is clear that there is something very wrong. It is time that corporations address the problems facing low-wage fast-food workers.”

A central sector

The industry has responded by warning that higher wages would translate into fewer jobs. Critics also suggest that these entry-level jobs are mostly important only for teenagers and those starting out in the workforce.

“The story promoted by the individuals organising these events does not provide an accurate picture of what it means to work at McDonald’s,” a spokesperson for the restaurant chain told IPS. “Our history is full of examples of individuals who worked their first job with McDonald’s and went on to successful careers both within and outside of McDonald’s.”

Yet a recent study, released in July by the National Employment Law Project, found that little more than two percent of fast-food jobs are managerial, professional or technical, thus providing “significantly limited” opportunities for advancement.

Others note that low-wage jobs in the United States, including those at fast-food restaurants, play a central role for a broad cross-section of workers.

“It is a common myth that very low-wage workers – workers who would see a raise if the minimum wage were increased – are mostly teenagers,” write David Cooper and Dan Essrow, authors of a new briefing paper and researchers with the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

“The reality is that raising the federal minimum wage to 10.10 dollars per hour would primarily benefit older workers. Eighty-eight percent of workers who would be affected by raising the minimum wage are at least 20 years old, and a third of them are at least 40 years old.”

As the United States has stumbled through the aftermath of the 2008-2009 economic downturn, fast-food and other low-wage jobs have become increasingly important, adding some 60 percent of post-recession jobs. That centrality looks set to continue, with government estimates projecting that fast-food jobs will post the sixth-highest growth of all jobs between 2010 and 2020.

For this reason, analysts are now suggesting that low-wage workers – long seen as particularly difficult to organise – will become an increasingly powerful voice in demanding higher compensation.

Falling short

Thursday’s strike came just a day after tens of thousands of people turned out to mark the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, one of the watershed events in the U.S. fight for civil rights.

At the commemoration, President Barack Obama reminded observers that the original marchers were demanding not only racial equality but also economic opportunity.

“It’s along this second dimension – of economic opportunity, the chance through honest toil to advance one’s station in life – where the goals of 50 years ago have fallen most short,” the president said Wednesday.

“[B]lack unemployment has remained almost twice as high as white unemployment, with Latino unemployment close behind. The gap in wealth between races has not lessened, it’s grown,” he stated. “The position of all working Americans, regardless of colour, has eroded.”

In the United States, upward mobility has become far more difficult over the past decade, the president noted, with labourers of all races seeing stagnating wages despite soaring corporate profits.

“The test was not, and never has been, whether the doors of opportunity are cracked a bit wider for a few,” he continued. “It was whether our economic system provides a fair shot for the many.”

One indicator of this lack of progress is that, during the 1963 march, protesters demanded a minimum wage that would translate to more than 13 dollars an hour at today’s rates. Even if the government had continued to update the minimum wage over the past half-century merely to keep up with inflation, this rate would today be around 10 dollars an hour.

Some legislative proposals have been made to set the minimum wage at this level, and in January Obama formally supported a modest rise to 9 dollars an hour. Yet all such proposals currently remain nonstarters in the Congress, evidently due to strong pushback from business groups.

Still, public support for an increase in the minimum wage is strong. According to polling carried out last month for the National Employment Law Project, 80 percent of U.S. adults support a 10.10 dollar minimum wage, with strong backing from all demographic and ideological categories.

In response to this public sentiment, U.S. states and cities alike have been stepping in and in just 2013, at least 13 states and several cities unilaterally raised their minimum wages.

In the aftermath of a recent high-profile U.S. murder trial, several new studies have found that the controversial self-defence law at the heart of the case, known as “Stand Your Ground”, is being applied differently depending on defendants’ ethnicity.

The new statistics on this racial disparity have come out as the Stand Your Ground laws, which have been passed in nearly three-dozen U.S. states, have come under review at the state and federal level.“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down.” -- Paul Graham of the Centre for Community Change

That includes in Florida, the location of the widely viewed trial of a “neighbourhood watch” volunteer named George Zimmerman, who was accused of the murder of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman’s acquittal last month, explained by some jurors as being based largely on the legality of his actions under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, outraged broad sections of the country.

The state-level “self-defence” statute was first introduced in 2005, and allows someone who feels threatened to use deadly force against an attacker without first trying to get away. For this reason, the law is also known as “No Duty to Retreat” and, by critics, “Shoot First”, and has been increasingly criticised for escalating rather than mitigating conflict.

Yet according to a new study by the Urban Institute, the application of this law has varied significantly according to the ethnic make-up of both the attacker and the victim.

The shooting of a black person by a white person, for instance, has been found to be justifiable under Stand Your Ground 17 percent of the time. On the other hand, the shooting of a white person by a black person has been found justifiable just slightly over one percent of the time.

In the states that have no such statute, white-on-black shootings were found to be justified about nine percent of the time.

“Stand Your Ground clearly has racial implication in communities of colour and black neighbourhoods,” Paul Graham, with the Ohio Organising Collaborative at the Centre for Community Change, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“When you have this kind of disparity and this kind of inequality, it is a devastating blow for all communities.”

Another recent investigation, carried out by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, looked at some 200 Stand Your Ground cases and found that defendants who had killed a black victim went free 73 percent of the time. Yet defendants who killed a white victim went free just 59 percent of the time.

Since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar laws, while several others are reportedly considering similar legislation. On average, so-called justifiable homicide rose by about eight percent in states with Stand Your Ground laws, amounting to about 600 additional killings.

“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down,” Graham says.

Under fire

The Stand Your Ground laws were strongly pushed for by a few high-profile gun-rights groups here, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA). In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin verdict, these groups have doubled down their support for these laws, including by suggesting that minorities stand the most to gain from such self-defence legislation.

“We all know why it’s come under fire right now, because of that one case in Florida, but that’s just a ruse for attacking self-defence in general,” Erich Pratt, communications director for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“[Changing Stand Your Ground] would adversely affect minorities, if we say that they are not going to be able to defend themselves when they fear for their lives. That’s really what we are talking about.”

Indeed, the Tampa Bay Times study also found that black gunshot victims were more likely than whites to be carrying a weapon when they were killed and were more likely to be committing a crime, such as burglary, at the time of any altercation.

In addition, while blacks make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, they constitute some 55 percent of its homicide victims, with the majority of those murders committed by other blacks.

Further, black youths have had a high success rate in arguing for justified homicide under Stand Your Ground law in “black-on-black” crimes.

However, there remains significant disparity in the success rate of justified homicide between white defendants and black defendants in white-on-black crimes.

“The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of colour,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

This evident racial disparity is now strengthening national calls for investigations into Stand Your Ground laws and their application on the ground.

“[I]f a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario … both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different,” President Barack Obama said last month in unusually personal remarks following the Zimmerman acquittal.

“And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?”

He continued: “And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Since then, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a government body, has started an investigation into these laws, while the Senate Judiciary Committee has also stated it would hold hearings on Stand Your Ground in September.

The Florida State Legislature will also be taking another look at the effect, benefits and consequences of the law this fall, the first such move it has made. Still, supporters are girding for a fight.

“I don’t expect that the legislature’s going to move one damn comma,” Matt Gaetz, chairperson of the Florida Criminal Justice Subcommittee and a supporter of the law, said recently. “If the members of the committee support changes, they will be proposed, but nobody can count on my vote.”