Pamela Waldron makes $7.75 an hour as a cashier at the KFC in New York's Penn Station, where she has worked for eight years.
That's just 50 cents above the New York state minimum wage. The 26-year old nursing student, and mother of two, says she has asked for a raise but her pleas have gone unheeded for weeks.
Finally, on Thursday, around lunchtime she joined a protest of about 40 fast food workers who walked out of their shifts, carrying placards and shouting slogans to bring attention to their cause of fighting for higher wages and the right to unionize. The protest was held outside a Burger King (BKW) near Penn Station.
Raymond Lopez, a 21-year old shift manager at the midtown Manhattan McDonald's, was one of the workers protesting Thursday morning. Lopez makes $8.75 an hour, after working at the hamburger joint for two years. Despite a 40-hour work week, Lopez works two more jobs to supplement his income, a part-time job at a condominium and at a caterer to pay his bills and his $500 student loan payments each month.
"I wouldn't be able to survive just working at McDonald's," he said.
According to Jonathon Westin, the organizing director for New York Communities for Change, workers like Lopez can't afford rent or to put food on the table with their meager wages.
Source: CNN
No comments:
Post a Comment