{"id":413,"date":"2014-09-23T14:31:09","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T14:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/?p=413"},"modified":"2015-10-13T19:04:14","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T19:04:14","slug":"fast-food-strikes-bring-everyone-to-the-table","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/trot\/2014\/09\/23\/fast-food-strikes-bring-everyone-to-the-table\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast Food Strikes Bring Everyone to the Table"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Flipping burgers at McDonald\u2019s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement<\/a> of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black\u00a0Friday<\/span>\u00a0strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.<\/p>\n

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.<\/h5>\n