The fast-food walkouts that began in New York City last November have just spread to cities in the South and West Coast. What’s next?

While President Obama continues his economic speaking tour, walkouts at fast food restaurants rippled across cities nationwide last week.

Approximately 400 fast food workers in New York City went on a day-long strike Thursday — the latest action in an ongoing campaign for higher wages and a cross-franchise union.

On January 25, labor unions in the United States were dealt a major blow. The D.C. Circuit Appeals Court — the second most powerful court in the country and one closely aligned with the Supreme Court — handed down a decision declaring President Barack Obama’s recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board invalid, which…
More

“Workers of the world unite!” says the traditional slogan of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies, since their founding in 1905, have envisioned a global union capable of waging a worldwide general strike. By its height in the 1920s, the union was capable of mobilizing hundreds of thousands of workers. But while the…
More

Hundreds of workers and supporters gathered in Chicago’s Cityfront Plaza on Thursday to speak out against the ways that major retail and fast food corporations are weakening the city’s economy with poverty-level wages. Marching along the Magnificent Mile and its throngs of holiday shoppers, the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) chanted and passed out…
More

Many, if not most, in the labor movement were deeply disappointed with the results of the Wisconsin uprising, from which the anti-labor establishment has emerged almost entirely victorious. A few months after the uprising began, Joe Burns, a labor lawyer and former union president, published Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and…
More

The line typically forms at the door of this Wendy’s in Downtown Brooklyn during lunch hour. Not today. That’s because a picket line circles the Fulton Street sidewalk in front of the restaurant and organizers with New York Communities for Change (NYCC) stand by the entrance distributing leaflets, urging costumers to eat elsewhere. The previous…
More

For Mahoma Lopez, a long-time restaurant worker in New York City, it came down to a decision between fight and flight. Last fall, his boss at the cafe on the Upper East Side where Lopez had worked for years began cutting hours and screaming at his employees, withholding overtime pay and threatening to fire anyone…
More

While the emblems of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Domino’s and other greasy dynasties are hard to escape in the American landscape, those who cook, clean, ring up orders and otherwise serve as the fulcrum of these franchises often go unnoticed. These workers, however, were hard to miss today as they stepped off burger assembly lines across…
More