The Fast Food Strikes and the Great Recession (September 4 Walkouts) [View all]

[alcibiades_mystery]

Fast food workers in up to 150 cities will be walking out in mini-strikes today, protesting for higher wages and the right to unionize. The resumption of the Fast Food Strikes, organized locally and through excellent umbrella orgs like Fast Food Forward, is making news across the media today, with non-violent civil disobedience predicted in some areas.

For those of you who eat fast food (I don't), solidarity on this day is not a bad idea.

But these strikes - now becoming one of today's central labor issues, point up a phenomenon on DU, I think.

We often hear that economic recovery from the Great Recession is illusory, that job gains are in low wage and service sectors like...well...fast food. There's good evidence to support this critique, so those who make it are, by and large, correct. But the push to organize fast food workers and gain higher pay cannot be separated from that very phenomenon. As people with formally higher wage jobs and former unionized workers get pushed into the fast food sector, they bring with them the labor consciousness they forged in their past work, and they bring their organizational expertise. That major efforts to organize the fast food sector would emerge as hundreds of thousands of workers are pushed into that sector economically should be no surprise.

But it is also a much more productive and promising labor tactic than mere critique of low wage work. Factory work was also once low wage and degrading work - until it wasn't. Every time somebody brings up low wage work in the service sector, we should ask them, "What have you done today to help organize or unionize or support workers in that sector?" What I love about the fast food strikes is simple: Workers are telling capital, it doesn't matter where you put us - we're going to fight for wages and dignity.