Dozens arrested during USA protests for higher minimum wages

The striking workers include “airport baggage handlers, Uber drivers, fast-food cooks, cashiers, hospital workers”, as Common Dreams reported, and many actions directly addressed the president-elect’s repressive policy plans: “Immigrants are the heart of the American workforce!” declared workers in Las Vegas, for example.

Raise Up Massachusetts plans a Statehouse rally later Tuesday to call for hiking the state’s hourly minimum wage – scheduled to go to $11 on January 1 – up to $15.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation in April that will gradually raise New York’s minimum wage to $15.

A few dozen protesters blocked the intersection at 98th Avenue and International Boulevard in Oakland early Tuesday morning.

The walkout, which is organized by the Service Employee International Union, is part of a national effort involving workers who take to the streets in 300 cities in a massive protest.

Raise Up Cleveland, a group backed by the SEIU, successfully petitioned to get a minimum-wage proposal for Cleveland on a May 2 special-election ballot.

Numerous protesters work in the fast food industry, and say they can’t survive at their current wages.

The raises sparked by the Fight for $15 are slowly beginning to reverse decades of wage declines that have resulted in 43% of the workforce, or 60 million workers, being paid less than $15/hour.

He added that that the 90 percent of McDonalds’ restaurants owned by independent franchisees, which make roughly 6 cents in profit for every dollar spent by consumers, could see their profit margin drop to zero.

The Central Square demonstrators were part of a national “day of action” pushing for higher wages in service and other industries. Jamie Eldridge, D-Acton, were arrested for civil disobedience at a rally outside a McDonald’s restaurant in Cambridge, according to his staff and news reports.

The bill would also raise the hourly wage for tipped workers, who now make $3.35 an hour.

Protests were held across the country asking for higher wages for minimum-wage workers on Tuesday.

“All these people don’t have savings because we’re working check to check”, New Yorker Flavia Cabral, who works two jobs, said Tuesday.

Raise Up estimates that an increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour would affect 900,000 employees in MA. But it’s an important reminder that organizing works-and we’re going to need to cling to that thought and dig in if we’re going to have a chance at moving any direction but backward.