McDonald’s strike

McDonald’s Workers Are Striking for a $15 Minimum Wage

McDonald’s Workers Are Striking for a $15 Minimum Wage
Meager pay, not a labor shortage, seems to be the company’s biggest problem.
Noah Lanard, Reporter
39 mins ago

In the past few weeks, McDonald’s outposts have responded to a supposed shortage of workers by offering $50 to anyone who shows up for an interview in Tampa, giving free combo meals to applicants in Central Florida, and offering small raises for workers at the 5 percent of locations that aren’t franchises. Today, McDonald’s workers in 15 cities are striking to demand a longer-term fix: a company-wide $15 minimum wage.

The strikes are backed by Fight for $15, a movement seeking a $15 wage and union rights for low-paid workers that is supported by the Service Employees International Union. The actions are happening one day before McDonald’s annual shareholder meeting. The company made nearly $5 billion last year, which allowed it to increase dividends to shareholders and pay its CEO more than $10 million.

“I plan to go on strike to say to McDonald’s: don’t wait for politicians in Washington to pay us what we need to survive,” Hakim Dumkia, a McDonald’s worker in St. Louis, said in a statement. “We supported McDonald’s through the pandemic, and now you need to pay us enough to support our families and our communities.”

Nahshon Blount, a 21-year-old who works at a McDonald’s in Durham, North Carolina, is also striking today. Blount told me he sees the strike as a chance to tell shareholders to do the right thing by raising pay instead of keeping the money for themselves.

Blount was making $8.50 an hour throughout most of the pandemic before a recent raise to $9.20 an hour, which means he’ll take home about $1,200 a month for full-time work. He gets no health insurance, sick days, or paid vacation. The franchise Blount works at has been short-staffed, which he believes would change if the owner paid workers at least $15.

He’d participated in an earlier strike, in December 2020, because he felt McDonald’s wasn’t doing enough to protect its workers from COVID-19. His decision to do so was a reflection of how much more dangerous and difficult food service jobs became during the pandemic. Yet wages in the leisure and hospitality sector, which includes restaurants, have only just gotten back to where they would have been had pre-COVID economic trends continued. Blount hopes to become a doctor, but can’t afford to take college courses with what he makes now.

McDonald’s recently announced it would increase wages by an average of 10 percent at the small minority of restaurants it runs directly. That will raise starting pay to $11 to $17 an hour, depending on the location.