The fast-food workers took turns detailing the indignities they endured on the job: taking the subway to work only to be sent home before a shift started, making $7.25 an hour after 10 years on the job, getting fired for eating a chicken nugget on the clock.
Then a man rolled up his sleeves, revealing burns from making french fries. Within moments, everyone in the room was doing the same. Their arms were covered in fresh wounds and old scars, from grease, from the grill, from hot coffeepots.
“What do we have to lose? We’re already working for pennies,” said LeGrand, who would go on to represent the fast-food workers at the White House and on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” “This could be a breakthrough to something different in our life, to actually be worth something.”
The groundwork for the movement was laid in 2011, when the Occupy movement started drawing unprecedented attention to the growing chasm between haves and have-nots. Around the same time, the Service Employees International Union launched a campaign called Fight for a Fair Economy.
The SEIU, which represents 2 million health care, janitorial, and other service workers, formed a coalition of 15 labor and community groups to reach out to low-wage workers and address concerns such as job creation and foreclosures, then running rampant through working-class communities.
Advocacy groups around the country were also stepping up efforts to help struggling residents. One of them, New York Communities for Change, started surveying low-income residents about affordable housing and other issues. Many of the most destitute — and vocal — people they met worked in fast food.
These cooks and cashiers were not teenagers working part time for extra cash, but parents struggling to feed their children. Some had worked in fast food for years, while living in public housing and relying on food stamps.
Read more: On the front line of the fight for $15 - The Boston Globe
Then a man rolled up his sleeves, revealing burns from making french fries. Within moments, everyone in the room was doing the same. Their arms were covered in fresh wounds and old scars, from grease, from the grill, from hot coffeepots.
“What do we have to lose? We’re already working for pennies,” said LeGrand, who would go on to represent the fast-food workers at the White House and on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” “This could be a breakthrough to something different in our life, to actually be worth something.”
The groundwork for the movement was laid in 2011, when the Occupy movement started drawing unprecedented attention to the growing chasm between haves and have-nots. Around the same time, the Service Employees International Union launched a campaign called Fight for a Fair Economy.
The SEIU, which represents 2 million health care, janitorial, and other service workers, formed a coalition of 15 labor and community groups to reach out to low-wage workers and address concerns such as job creation and foreclosures, then running rampant through working-class communities.
Advocacy groups around the country were also stepping up efforts to help struggling residents. One of them, New York Communities for Change, started surveying low-income residents about affordable housing and other issues. Many of the most destitute — and vocal — people they met worked in fast food.
These cooks and cashiers were not teenagers working part time for extra cash, but parents struggling to feed their children. Some had worked in fast food for years, while living in public housing and relying on food stamps.
Read more: On the front line of the fight for $15 - The Boston Globe
