On April 15, America will witness a protest which is billed as “the largest low wage worker mobilization in modern history.” Workers will demand a $15 an hour minimum wage and the right to form a union without employer interference. Rallies will be held in more than 200 U.S. cities. It will be a one-day strike for many, but they will be joined by students from more than 170 universities, social justice advocates with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, numerous local community groups and religious people. In Denver, the protest will start at 5 p.m. on the Auraria campus near downtown. Allied protests are planned in nations such as France, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Brazil and Bangladesh.
The movement is gaining momentum in Colorado. On March 23, about 300 people attended a “Raise the Wage” rally on the west steps of the state Capitol. Andrew Olson, a 25-year-old McDonald’s worker in Aurora, told the crowd that he makes $8.60 per hour. He collects food stamps, doesn’t have health insurance and has impacted wisdom teeth that he can’t afford to remove. He said, “People like us who work hard should be able to afford the basics — like food, a place to live and health care — without relying on public services.”
Robert Lindgren, the lead organizer for Colorado WINS (the state employee union), attended the rally. He told me that “nearly 3,000 classified state employees across 71 job classes make under $15 an hour. They include accountants, technicians, custodians, client care aids, childcare workers, security guards, IT professionals and admin support.” He noted that 503 classified workers at the University of Colorado Boulder make less than $15 an hour.
The rally was designed partly to support Democrats in the state legislature who are trying to raise the minimum wage through legislation.
There’s House Bill 1300, which would repeal a 16-year-old statute prohibiting local governments from establishing their own minimum wage. It was later approved by the House, which has a Democratic majority. It now moves on to the Senate, which is controlled by the Republicans. It will likely be killed there.
There’s House Concurrent Resolution 1001, which would have put an initiative on the state ballot that would have amended the state’s constitution to raise Colorado’s current minimum wage of $8.23 per hour to $9.50 per hour, starting in 2017. The minimum wage would increase annually until it reached $12.50 per hour in 2020. The proposal won a 33-31 majority, short of the two-thirds majority required for ballot initiatives launched by the legislature. Activists are planning to collect signatures to put this measure on the ballot.
For the last few years, low wage workers have been protesting and staging short strikes all over the country. In many cities and states, voters and elected officials have been increasing the minimum wage. Many polls show that most Americans support raising the federal minimum wage from its pathetic $7.25 an hour.
Large corporations like Wal-Mart and Target have been raising the pay of their poverty-wage employees. Recently, McDonald’s announced it was raising the pay of thousands of employees (by $1 above the local minimum wage). But it only applies to its company-owned restaurants, which are about 10 percent of its 14,350 stores in the U.S.
The rest are owned by franchisees who the company claims are independent small businesses. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) disagrees. Last December, the NLRB general counsel said McDonald’s “engages in sufficient control over its franchisees’ operations … to make it a putative joint employer with its franchisees, sharing liability for violations of our Act.” It will deal with numerous unfair labor practice complaints against the main company and franchises in hearings set to begin in May.
The NLRB counsel said it found “merit” in allegations that the company, jointly with franchisees had engaged in “discriminatory discipline, reductions in hours, discharges and other coercive conduct directed at employees in response to union and protected concerted activity, including threats, surveillance, interrogations, promises of benefit and overbroad restrictions on communicating with union representatives or with other employees about unions and the employees’ terms and conditions of employment.”
Unfortunately, McDonald’s behavior is quite common. The NLRB may rule against McDonald’s but our weak labor laws will guarantee that the grossly inadequate penalties they pay won’t keep them from doing it again. Workers need to win a living wage but they also need to to be able to form unions to fight for their rights.
This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.
