[col. writ. 12/23/13] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal
Recently, workers in national restaurant chains held minimum wage protests across the country in something like 100 cities. They were immediately set upon by the corporate media, their attack dogs snarling for their masters, and nipping at their heels for daring to demand a living wage.
For many people, it was a revelation, for workers in most restaurants are un-unionized, at-will workers, meaning they can be fired on a whim; for any reason at all. May such workers can barely keep a home, pay rent and eat on the meager pay they receive.
Hence the demand for a higher, livable minimum wage.
In 1996, the national minimum wage was set at $7.25 an hour (or $290.00 a week). At that rate with a family of four, a person would be living below the nation’s poverty line.
That’s why workers across the country have now demanded a minimum wage of $15.00 an hour.
Predictably, the media attack dogs of capital were unleashed to bark two basic messages: That food service and restaurant businesses provide jobs for teenagers just entering the working world; and that restaurants barely break even, and cannot afford to pay such a wage.
Interesting.
But next time you’re in a franchise restaurant, take a good look behind the counter, for there, more often than not; you’ll see a man or woman, in the autumn of their years, with gray hair, a bald head, a few wrinkles and bifocals.
Secondly, the nation’s franchise restaurants, like McDonald’s, Hardees, Subway, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, are among the biggest franchises in the nation. McDonald’s, for example, has over 32 thousand locations; Subway has over 34 thousand.
McDonald’s pulled in over $24 billion in 2011, and is the 111th biggest business in the United States.
In other words, business is good.
There’s another reason why a minimum wage hike of 15 bucks an hour makes sense: it stimulates the economy, from the bottom up.
The big bailouts following the Great Recession of 2008-09 failed, miserably, to really stimulate the economy. For, it protected the assets of the wealthy, who had no incentive to share the wealth. They just sat on it, building their pile(s). It bailed out banks –not people.
If poor and working people get a raise, they don’t put it in a bank; they buy things. And let’s face it; this is a consumer driven economy.
It’s past time for a raise in the minimum wage.
And fifteen bucks an hour should be the very least to be found acceptable.
–© ’13 maj