Strikes, marches, and rallies are happening coast to coast today in hundreds of towns and cities. What amounts to a new type of labor movement – one that unites union and non-union workers with a broad range of allies in the communities across the nation is turning out strikers and demonstrators in city after city, demanding a new minimum wage of $15 an hour.
Joining the national “war on poverty wages” today are airport workers, home health care workers, college adjunct professors and tens of thousands of others living with poverty wages.
In city after city workers will gather at one or more McDonald’s or fast food outlet or at a big box store – in some places backing strikers who have shut the places down and in others joining the local workers in mounting picket lines and holding rallies.
The first action before dawn will be on the East Coast and will be rapidly followed, from east to west, at hundreds and then thousands of locations across the country. All the way over on the West Coast, 20,000 are expected to strike and demonstrate in Los Angeles.
College students will join in across the country, staging massive die-ins at restaurants in malls and at fast food restaurants and on the streets and highways.
Construction workers at job sites across the nation will join in the rallies.
Health care workers and nurses in uniform will march at the restaurants and in front of hospitals.
In some cities these groups will hold separate demonstrations and then march to locations where they join in support of the national call for $15.
At night there will be candle light rallies filling places like Times Square and other important locations across the country.
The Peoples World has reporters on the scene covering the actions all over the country.
The national Fight for $15 effort to raise the country’s minimum wage began two-and-a-half years ago in New York City when 200 cooks and cashiers walked off their jobs. The movement they started has never stopped growing.
Photo: nationofchange.org
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