Fast Food Workers Need a Whopping Raise,
and a Fighting Union!

Class Struggle Against Poverty Wages

Pressuring Democrats Is a Dead-End

Above: Boistrous demonstration for $15/hour wage outside restaurant on Fulton Street, Brooklyn, December 5. (Internationalist photos)

Build a Revolutionary Workers Party!

DECEMBER 5 – Over the last year and a half there have been a number of well-publicized protests at fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, and at stores of the vast Walmart chain, the largest private employer in the world. Although they have been billed as “strikes,” the number of workers who have actually walked off the job is very small – for obvious reasons, since they face immediate dismissal by their viciously anti-union employers at the least sign of labor militancy. Mostly these have been media events organized by a few unions and foundation-funded NGOs (“non-governmental organizations”). But they have gotten attention and the conditions faced by low-wage workers are so terrible that they could eventually spark something.

(Photo: NPR)

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The sorry state of trade unions in the U.S. is not due so much to anti-labor laws as to the unwillingness of union leaders to defy the bosses’ legality. The policy of the labor fakers is class collaboration as opposed to class struggle. ...

 The only road to actually breaking the cycle of poverty, racism and endless war that is inherent in capitalism is for those organizing low-wage workers to put forward a program of militant class struggle, breaking with the Democrats to form a revolutionary workers party.

Such a program must not limit itself to wages but must take up all the forms of oppression we face. Women are a majority of low-wage and part-time workers, and a large number are single moms. A real fight to defend them must include demands for free, 24-hour daycare. Also, most employees of fast food restaurants are African American, Latino and Asian workers who also face racist repression, like the notorious “stop and frisk” practices of the NYPD. Instead of talking of “reforming” this racist profiling, as mayor-elect de Blasio does, class-struggle militants call for workers mobilization to put an end to “stop and frisk” once and for all.

For the large number of undocumented workers trapped in low-wage jobs, a key demand is for full citizenship rights for all immigrants: everyone should have the same rights. And as U.S. imperialism under commander in chief Obama continues its wars around the world, working-class internationalists fight to defeat the war on working people, “at home” and abroad, through international socialist revolution. A tall order, but it’s the only road. ■