Shortly following Labor Day this year, several hundred protestors, primarily fast-food workers, took to the streets of New York, chanting in unison their desire for a fifteen dollar minimum wage. After the city police contained the workers with metal barricades, they arrested 19, using plastic disposable handcuffs, cramming them into the back of police vans (William Finnegan, The New Yorker). According to William Finnegan, in his piece, Dignity, featured in The New Yorker magazine, these fast-food workers were employed by a number of restaurant chains across New York, and were victims of the cruel systems designed solely to maximize profit. The piece centers both on current union movement against abusive fast-food empires, and the story of a Arisleyda Tapia, a McDonald's worker, and single mother of a young girl, making $8.35 an hour.
The way that Finnegan wove together the personal story of this struggling woman with the recent events in the battle "to get a union and fifteen", as the protestors say, was eye-opening to say the least. Through revealing the harsh realities of working for an emotionless fast food empire, Finnegan has convinced me that the politicians in Washington need to stop worrying about every possible, little consequence of adjusting the minimum wage in every which way, and start focusing more on the fact that there are millions of Americans suffering from the current policy at this very moment.
As I used to see it, the argument over whether to raise the minimum wage or not did have two very strong sides. However, inaction means that nothing with change for those working minimum wage jobs, who are unable to adequately provide for their families, or afford a quality education, despite working full time. One recent study revealed the figure of minimum wage fast food workers that require some form of public assistance at nearly 52 percent. That is not a figure being predicted by some politician or economist who is not even involved in the issue; that is what is really happening to actual people.
This does not seem to fit into the American ideals that I grew up being familiar with. Isn't the US government supposedly one of the fairest in the world, emphasizing equality and freedoms for all people, regardless of class, race, gender, or beliefs? Though the US government is not oppressing anyone directly, millions of American citizens are without many freedoms because the US government cannot decide whether they should allow workers stable living incomes. The government isn't quite sure whether Tapia deserves the money to send her daughter to preschool.
While simply rasing the minimum wage will not simply result in aiding the lower class without any reverberation, the separation between classes in this country may be growing so vast that reverberations may just have to dealt with for the time being.With the differential between income of the typical fast food worker and the C.E.O. of the respective company in the country averaging as high as 1200 to one, it is difficult to say that fairness and equality is still as economically present in our nation as it should be (Finnegan). If our nation wants to maintain the values that it prides itself so greatly on exemplifying, then our country must accept that working class citizens and C.E.O.'s alike, are both entitled to a certain standard of living.
This whole strike is a bit out of hand. I do think that the minimum wage should be increased for all, to have enough money for the necessities. But in reality you are being paid for the quality of labor you do, which is not so difficult. The minimum wage that the workers are asking for is too high. These amounts would cause fast food restaurants to have less employees, more people with no jobs would result from this. The America I know is a capitalist system where there is a large divide between social classes not equality in economic status.
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