Eyewitness to Fast-Food Strikes: Another Reason to Support REASON!

Here’s yet another reason to support Reason during our annual webathon: We’re
out on the streets covering all sorts of events that matter.

Consider last Thursday, when the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU) coordinated “wage strikes” in over 100 cities and
called for a minimum wage of $15 an hour for fast-food workers.
Reason TV covered the event held in New York City and filed a
report that you didn’t see on your evening news.

Take a look by clicking above and read the original writeup of
our coverage by going below the fold.

If you appreciate this sort of thing, please consider giving us
a tax-deductible donation. Details on all that here.

Yesterday, Naomi Brockwell and I attended a demonstration
demanding that fast-food restaurants boost their minimum wage to
$15 per hour, or a little more than double the current federal
minimum wage. The strike, which was led by a group
called Fast Food
Forward that’s affiliated with the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), was one of more than a 100 similar
demonstrations held in cities across the country.

The New York demonstration had about 150 people, but the number
of actual fast food employees participating in the strike was
small. It was business as usual at every restaurant we dropped
by yesterday morning and, at a McDonald’s restaurant on 23rd
Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, employees behind the
counter said they had heard nothing about a strike.

We caught up with the protesters in front of a Wendy’s in
downtown Brooklyn, where the crowd consisted of union organizers,
fast-food workers, and their sympathizers. An estimated one-third
of the demonstrators were fast-food employees, meaning that less
than one-tenth of 1 percent of New York City’s 57,000 fast-food
workforce participated in the strike.

The group was traveling from one fast-food restaurant to
another, before winding up at Foley Square in Manhattan around
1pm.

Multiple strikers told us they had received compensation through
a union strike fund to appear, but declined to say the amount they
were paid.

Artificially doubling wages to $15 an hour would change many
things in the fast food industry, including the easy path it
provides for low-skilled employees to break into the labor market.
Substantially higher wages would mean that existing employees would
be less apt to look for other positions, and senior staffers would
be more inclined to hog shift hours. Franchisees would likely move
more aggressively to replace human service workers with automated
cash registers, which is already
happening in European McDonald’s. Evidence of how
artificially boosting wages destroys opportunities for entry level
workers was best documented in a 2006 study by
economists David Neumark and William Wascher, which
was updated in
2013. 

In interviews, several striking
workers described how it had been relatively easy for them to get a
job in fast-food service. Shenita Simon, who works as a shift
supervisor at KFC, told us that she doesn’t know where else
she would have been able to find a position, because fast food is
the only industry that “will allow you to have minimum
education.” Isaac Wallace, a Burger King employee, described
how he was able to get his job immediately after moving to New York
from Jamaica by simply walking into a Burger King in Brooklyn
and approaching the manager. 

Once the strike moved to Foley Square, organizers from Fast Food
Forward began obstructing our efforts to talk with protesters.

For more on why doubling wages for fast food workers would hurt
entry-level workers, read Nick Gillespie’s “Big
Labor’s Big Mac Attack” at The Daily
Beast.

Produced by Jim Epstein and hosted by Naomi Brockwell.

About 2.30 minutes.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe
to Reason TV’s
YouTube Channelto receive automatic updates when new material
goes live.